Inigo Meets Apigee: Elevate Your GraphQL APIs in Google Cloud

For organizations utilizing Apigee on Google Cloud to manage their APIs, the NEW integration with Inigo has the potential to revolutionize your GraphQL API strategies. Inigo's comprehensive suite of features significantly enhances observability and security, delivering detailed insights and precise control crucial for optimizing API performance and ensuring reliability.

Why Inigo with Apigee?

Apigee provides robust tools for API security, traffic management, and analytics. Yet, when it comes to managing GraphQL's complex queries, variable execution times, and unique security concerns, additional challenges in security, auditing, and management arise. Inigo fills these gaps with its tailored observability and security features designed specifically for GraphQL. Inigo allows your organization to address and eliminate the blind spots and vulnerabilities that persist when relying solely on an API gateway like Apigee. Additionally, Inigo enhances your security posture by uncovering shadow APIs that operate through your API gateway, ensuring comprehensive protection and oversight.

Features of Inigo

Inigo brings a plethora of features that complement Apigee’s capabilities:

• Detailed Observability: With features like tree views, heat maps, and operation metrics, Inigo allows teams to dive deep into how their GraphQL queries perform and interact. The timeline and detailed query information provide real-time insights into API usage patterns.

• Security Enhancements: Inigo supports role-based access control, field-level rate limiting, and operation limits, ensuring your GraphQL APIs remain secure against over-fetching and other potential security vulnerabilities.

• Schema and Configuration Management: Keep track of schema changes with Inigo’s SDL navigator and diff view. The history of schema applications and configuration adjustments helps maintain consistency and auditability across your API lifecycle.

Integrating Inigo with Apigee via ExternalCallout Policy

Integrating Inigo’s features into your Apigee workflow is streamlined through Apigee’s ExternalCalloutPolicy. This policy allows Apigee to call out to an external gRPC service – in this case, Inigo’s sidecar – during API processing. Once implemented, here is how the Inigo integration with Apigee functions:

Here’s how to leverage it for enhanced GraphQL API management:

1. Set Up ExternalCallout Policy: Configure the ExternalCallout XML in your Apigee API proxy to interact with Inigo. This setup invokes Inigo’s functionalities during the API transaction process.

2. Data Processing and Analytics: As API requests pass through Apigee, Inigo processes the GraphQL queries, applying its observability and security mechanisms. This includes monitoring API health, tracking agent status, and analyzing query performance.

3. Feedback Loop: Information from Inigo can be fed back into Apigee, allowing for dynamic adjustments to API handling based on real-time metrics and insights gathered by Inigo.

How Inigo and Apigee Work in Unison

The synergy between Inigo and Apigee offers a comprehensive routing solution, managing, securing, and observing GraphQL APIs:

• Routing and Management: Apigee's powerful routing capabilities direct GraphQL requests to the appropriate backend services, while Inigo’s observability tools provide insights into the structure and performance of these queries. This combination ensures that APIs are routed efficiently and monitored for any issues in real-time.

• Security: By integrating Inigo’s security features, such as role-based access control and operation limits, into Apigee’s existing security framework, organizations can address the unique challenges posed by GraphQL. This includes protecting against excessive data retrieval and ensuring that sensitive data is accessed appropriately.

• Observability: Inigo’s advanced observability features, like heat maps and operation metrics, complement Apigee’s analytics capabilities. This enables teams to understand API performance and user engagement better, facilitating proactive optimizations and enhancements.

Benefits for Your Organization

Integrating Inigo with Apigee enhances your API’s security and observability and empowers your teams to:

• Identify and Resolve Issues Faster: With advanced monitoring tools and detailed analytics, pinpointing and fixing issues becomes quicker and more efficient.

• Optimize API Performance: Understand and optimize API usage patterns based on concrete data regarding slow queries, top errors, and user metrics.

• Enhance API Security: Implement advanced security measures tailored to GraphQL's unique needs, enhancing your overall API management strategy.

Conclusion

For businesses already using Apigee, adding Inigo provides a powerful enhancement to your GraphQL API management, ensuring that your APIs are not only robust and reliable but also extends to GraphQL APIs optimized for high performance and tight security. By leveraging Inigo’s detailed analytics and specialized security features, organizations can achieve a new level of security posture, control and insight into their complete API ecosystems.

Ready to take the next steps with Inigo + Apigee? You can:

1. Get started for free at app.inigo.io
2. Book a demo today at inigo.io/demo
3. Ask questions on our Slack channel