API Monetization
Once you create and configure your APIs in API Gateway, you can create a monetization strategy for your APIs.
API Gateway allows you to create packages and plans. As an API provider or API product manager, you can configure the packages and plans as per your organization requirements to monetize your APIs.
The general flow to monetize APIs is as follows:
When you add an API to a package for monetization, the API key authentication mechanism is automatically added to the IAM policy at API level. If the API already contains an IAM policy that has two authentication mechanisms with the AND condition, then the condition is switched to OR. This ensures that the monetization is supported when certain consumer applications access the API by just using the API key.
In a typical API monetization solution, you have the following components. You can create an end-to-end monetization experience by integrating these components.
API Gateway. You can create APIs, packages and plans and host them in
API Gateway. In addition, you can enforce quota and rate limits and monitor the API usage.
Note:
If you are configuring API consumption rate limits for any purpose other than monitoring, apply the Traffic optimization policy, instead of packaging. For information about the policy, see
Traffic Optimization.
Billing solution. You can translate the APIs, Packages, and Plans into billable products. You can perform customer information and billing related activities here, based on the usage quota.
API Portal. Here consumers find and subscribe to the API packages and plans.
Note:
With
API Gateway 10.11, you can create a subscription by using the Subscription REST API. For more details about this API, see
Subscription Management.
API Gateway does not support a billing solution. However, it provides the following extensions, which you can use to integrate with a billing system.
APIs to create, read, update, and delete the APIs, packages, plans, and subscriptions.
Extensible model that enables extending meta data for packages, plans, and subscriptions to store additional (billing or consumer related) data.
Auditing and lifecycle provides support to track the changes to assets. You can use the Search API to retrieve the audit data or you can configure the audit data to be pushed to different destinations as and when there is a change. For more details about Search API, see
API Gateway Search. For more details about custom destination, see
Custom Destination.
API Gateway monitors the usage and transactions. APIs are available to retrieve the monitoring and transactions data or you can configure
API Gateway to push this data to different destinations. Alerts can be configured to be sent to different destinations for different metrics. To learn more, see
Transaction Data.
API Gateway provides APIs to retrieve the usage information for an API or a subscription. You can use this data to determine the quota usage and for billing purposes.
Note:
To view usage metrics, you must either add log invocation policy to each API or use global policy to generate transaction events.
On the API Gateway to API Portal integration, API Gateway provides support for publishing APIs, packages and plans to API Portal and also provides support for creating subscriptions from the API Portal. Additionally, API Gateway pushes API transactions to API Portal.
