Top 10 Benefits of Inigo’s Replacement for GraphOS
At the industry events GraphQLConf, GraphQL Summit, and API World, we noticed a clear message: Users of Apollo Studio and GraphOS are looking for alternatives. Despite its range of features, GraphOS falls short in critical areas such as observability and security. Moreover, its pricing structure and rigid deployment demands are compelling Apollo customers to consider other options.
Responding to this customer demand, Inigo has enhanced its platform, positioning it as a seamless substitute for Apollo GraphOS without compromising on the superior observability and security features that set Inigo apart.
Top 10 Benefits of Inigo Over GraphOS
Inigo’s superior feature set directly translates to improving the everyday experience of using GraphQL for developers, operators, architects, and managers of GraphQL services, including the dedicated API Platform Teams that are becoming more commonplace in large organizations.
Here are the Top 10 benefits of swapping out GraphOS for Inigo:
1. Take Your Existing Apollo GraphQL Deployments To the Next Level
Inigo readily supports Apollo's open-source Server, Gateway, and Router. You can easily integrate Inigo with your existing Apollo deployments by installing the Inigo agent, streamlining your setup process. Migrating from GraphOS to Inigo is straightforward, and you can leverage Inigo’s schema composition and schema-checking features for a smooth transition with Apollo Federation. Best of all, you can immediately leverage all of the other benefits of Inigo to take your Apollo deployments to the next level!
2. Freedom to Choose and Scale for the Future
As your organization's use of GraphQL evolves, so must the adaptability of your teams and technologies. Relying solely on vendor support tailored for the Apollo stack may prove restrictive, particularly when various departments within your organization require diverse GraphQL implementations to meet their unique technical demands. Inigo offers a versatile management platform that integrates effortlessly with any GraphQL server configuration, ensuring a uniform GraphQL management experience throughout your enterprise. Inigo combines robust power with unparalleled flexibility.
3. Spare Your Developers from GraphQL Complexities
Inigo goes above and beyond GraphOS to make GraphQL simpler for developers. Inigo instills a separation of concerns between GraphQL observability and security and the GraphQL implementation code that developers need to write. Inigo’s configuration-as-code approach can supplant hundreds of lines of code for query protections, JWT authentication, RBAC, rate-limiting, logging, tracing, and more. Introducing Inigo to your developers and adopting its features can be done gradually, and it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.
4. Improve Collaboration for Building and Operating GraphQL Services
Developers, Architects, and Operators involved in GraphQL services require a collaborative approach to successfully develop, deploy, monitor, and maintain these services. While GraphOS provides fundamental collaborative tools through its GraphOS Explorer, Inigo takes this a step further by integrating features of Explorer with enhanced analytics and schema management, achieving a level of integration not possible in GraphOS.
Inigo also simplifies the collaboration process by allowing users to share direct links to pertinent Analytics data, such as error reports or performance metrics, streamlining the diagnostic process. Additionally, Inigo enables the creation of user groups with defined roles and responsibilities, ensuring that information can be shared effectively without compromising access control.
5. Improve Standards for Your GraphQL Services
Enterprises employing GraphQL across multiple teams often grapple with standardizing their GraphQL schemas. This challenge is further intensified by the complexities of managing supergraph schemas with Apollo Federation. Developers need robust tools that can be used locally to facilitate schema modifications while adhering to set standards and compliance requirements. Inigo addresses these issues with its advanced GraphQL Schema Linting feature that parallels GraphOS’s linting capabilities.
Additionally, Inigo's suite of developer tools, coupled with its configuration-as-code approach, simplifies the enforcement of standardization. It also provides sophisticated schema-checking functionalities that aid in normalizing schemas and preempting composition errors, ensuring smooth integration and consistency across the enterprise's GraphQL architecture.
6. Make Informed Decisions on How to Evolve Your GraphQL Schemas
GraphOS lacks the detailed analytics required to thoroughly examine client interactions with your API and schema. In contrast, Inigo captures comprehensive data, logging every type, field, and directive queried, and correlates this data to the actual GraphQL clients, providing valuable metrics. This information can be superimposed on your GraphQL schema to create visual heat maps, offering clear insights into how clients are utilizing your schema.
With Inigo, you can drill down to the specific details of who queried what and when including the frequency of each query. This level of detail empowers you to proactively safeguard against potential breaking changes and to strategically plan the future development of your schema. Inigo stands alone in providing these deep analytics that are essential for fully understanding the performance and use of your GraphQL APIs.
7. Optimize Your GraphQL Services More Easily with Real-Time Performance Data
Inigo offers a comprehensive solution for monitoring GraphQL performance by capturing 100% of query performance data, in contrast to GraphOS, which only captures a small sample. This complete data collection with Inigo means you'll have access to accurate p95 metrics, crucial for pinpointing performance irregularities and bottlenecks that might remain unnoticed with partial data. Additionally, Inigo enables you to trace poorly performing queries to the precise moment they occurred, allowing for a more straightforward comparison with other monitoring tools and a much easier diagnosis of any dips in performance.
8. Improve Error Capturing and Alerting for GraphQL Operations
While GraphOS provides basic features to capture and alert on GraphQL errors, Inigo elevates this functionality by allowing users to categorize and prioritize errors, ensuring that teams focus on the most critical issues first. Inigo’s advanced capabilities include custom GraphQL directives tailored to trigger alerts for only the most severe errors, thus mitigating the risk of alert fatigue. Adopting Inigo transforms your GraphQL error-capturing and alerting capabilities, ensuring that your GraphQL monitoring is effective and efficient.
9. Make Compliant, Mission-Critical GraphQL Services Possible
The adoption of GraphQL in mission-critical enterprise environments hinges on its ability to meet rigorous compliance standards. These standards often encompass service-level agreements (SLAs) that specify exacting performance, uptime, and security criteria.
For sectors like finance and healthcare, compliance takes on an even greater significance due to the necessity of meticulously tracking client data access and the capacity to conduct thorough audits. Features essential for maintaining such compliance, including rate limiting, role-based access control (RBAC), advanced performance monitoring and alerting, and audit trails, are beyond the capabilities offered by GraphOS.
Moreover, compliance often demands versatile deployment strategies for GraphQL servers and gateways, such as on-premises or private cloud deployments, while also needing to align with SaaS applications. Inigo stands out as the sole provider with the comprehensive features and tools required to construct GraphQL services that align with the high compliance standards of mission-critical enterprise operations.
10. Understand the Business Value Your GraphQL Services Are Providing
If your organization is just beginning to adopt GraphQL, you might be facing the considerable task of shifting from established REST or even traditional SOAP services to this new technology. A hurdle in adopting GraphQL is that it can act as a layer over existing backend services, potentially masking critical API usage metrics, which are key to understanding GraphQL's business impact. Such a lack of clear data can make it hard to argue for increased investment in GraphQL.
Inigo offers a solution with its sophisticated analytics tools, which shed light on how GraphQL services are used, right down to individual subgraphs. This insight allows for a detailed analysis of your schema's efficiency and gaps, helping to chart a purposeful path for the integration of GraphQL across your organization. Inigo's detailed analytics are essential for demonstrating the value of GraphQL, offering a depth of understanding that GraphOS simply does not provide.
GraphOS vs. Inigo Feature Comparison
Inigo matches and surpasses the capabilities of GraphOS in critical areas, including observability, analytics, security, managed federation, and developer tools. Inigo effectively fills the gaps found in GraphOS, and a direct comparison between the two platforms is shown in the following table:
As you can see in the table, there are quite a few differences between GraphOS and Inigo. Still, Inigo surpasses GraphOS for critical features that users of GraphQL want to improve their day-to-day experience with GraphQL.
Conclusion
In the fast-paced tech environment where GraphQL has become a critical part of many organizations’ API strategies, choosing the right platform to manage your GraphQL services is pivotal. Inigo emerges not just as an alternative but as a beacon of advancement for those who seek not only to keep pace but to lead in innovation.
Inigo represents a strategic opportunity for businesses to maintain the continuity of their GraphQL operations with minimal pipeline disruption, escape the constraints of vendor lock-in, and ensure compatibility with the existing tech stack.
More than just a tool, Inigo is a safeguard for your developers, a catalyst for rapid GraphQL adoption, and a trusted vendor that understands the needs of an evolving tech landscape. It offers a unique blend of flexibility, security, and insightful analytics that not only rectifies the shortcomings of GraphOS but propels your GraphQL capabilities into a new realm of potential.
By choosing Inigo, you're not just upgrading your GraphQL management platform; you're investing in a partnership that understands the complexities of modern API ecosystems. You're gaining a collaborator dedicated to your growth, one that provides the clarity and control necessary to transform data into actionable insights, turn challenges into opportunities, and convert technological potential into tangible business success.
Here's a quote from one of our satisfied customers highlighting the benefits they've experienced with Inigo:
Just wanted to let y’all know that Inigo has been so dope for helping us understand customer impact when something goes wrong. We can see how many unique users were affected in a few clicks. Love that Analytics tab!
Ready to take the next steps with Inigo? You can:
- Get started for free at app.inigo.io
- Book a demo today at inigo.io/demo
- Ask questions on our Slack channel
