APIM debugging, tracing, monitoring tricks and tips

Debugging APIM requests from Visual Studio code

Has an extension for debugging APIM.

Azure API Management - Visual Studio Marketplace

It's also useful to have a APIM requesting/client extension installed

Tracing APIM

To get a full trace add the HTTP header "Ocp-Apim-Trace: true" to the request and the response shall contain a URL to retrieve the trace information.

App Insights for APIM

Logs in three places:

Incoming requests (come into APIM)
Dependency request (go to backend/outgoing)
if an exception occurs it is also logged in App Insights

So logging can be set at either the global or API level.

Setup in APIM > Monitoring > Application Insights (link APIM to the App insights Logger).

Documentation Tips

Ensure you fill in relevant descriptions and summaries. It's also key to provide examples.

https://swagger.io/docs/specification/adding-examples/

My Technical Working Notes for Microsoft Technology: APIM OpenAPI Specification Documentation Example within the Developer Portal (pbeck.co.uk)

APIM documentation updates on the Developer portal (after re-publishing). It has a great UI, but ensure the summaries are added for param/attributes to get a truly rich integration set of documentation (it will save so many questions and time). I also like to add a getting started guide, keep it short and simple and most importantly have a simple explanation of security/authentication and connectivity.

- in: query

name: age

schema:

type: integer

maximum: 3

examples: # Multiple examples

max: # Distinct name

value: 3 # Example value

summary: The age is dependent on dob, min is 0, can't be negative

PB APIM Series:

APIM Notes

APIM Testing with Postman (this post)