A catalog of API Gateway metrics and its quantitative evaluation
Eder Dos Santos, Sandra Isabel Casas · DYNA · 2025
In the rapidly evolving API Economy, quality of API management software has become a critical concern. This work analyzed the API management industry with a particular focus on the metrics available for various API Gateway products. The primary artifact is a catalog with 59 metrics, compiled from global industry reports and technical documentation of 68 leading API Gateway products. The Design Science Research (DSR) approach was adopted to design the catalog, and metrics were categorized based on clear definitions in recent scientific literature. Secondly, a quantitative analysis method was proposed and systematically performed. Findings indicate that the metrics mainly focus on latency, response time, API performance, error capturing, and traffic monitoring. Features such as caching, resource utilization, and system health were scarcely addressed by the examined products. The proposed artifacts provide an objective foundation for a deeper understanding of API Management software quality, and lay the groundwork for future research.