February 28, 2025 API Product Management

Why a Unified View of API Usage is Critical for Managing Multiple API Gateways

APIs have become the backbone of our digital world, with surveys showing that over 70% of developers plan to increase API usage year-over-year. They power everything from mobile apps and SaaS integrations to IoT devices and partner platforms, enabling businesses to deliver seamless services and experiences to customers. As organizations grow, however, so does the complexity of their API ecosystem. Many teams end up deploying multiple API gateways, often to manage different product lines, microservices, or regional deployments.

While multiple gateways can offer flexibility and specialized features, they also create new challenges. Each gateway might have its own monitoring dashboards, security configurations, documentation portals, and analytics tools. Product managers, developers, and operational teams quickly find themselves juggling scattered bits of data as they attempt to track API usage, performance metrics, and monetization results across these disparate solutions.

That’s why forward-thinking organizations are turning to unified API management for multiple API gateways. By consolidating data from all their gateways into a single source of truth, they gain the ability to track both operational KPIs (like uptime and error rates) and business KPIs (like usage growth and revenue impact) from one shared dashboard. This not only streamlines troubleshooting and optimization but also enables product managers to “package” their APIs effectively whether for new subscription tiers, developer-friendly bundles, or usage-based pricing models.

Let’s explore the reasons organizations end up with multiple API gateways, the pitfalls and pain points they encounter, and the specific benefits that a unified approach can deliver. Along the way, you’ll see how incorporating centralized analytics and leveraging platforms like Moesif, can help unravel the complexity, drive better decisions, and ultimately boost your bottom line.

Monitor and Analyze APIs with Moesif 14 day free trial. No credit card required. Try for Free

Unified API Management for Multiple API Gateways: Why They Exist in an Organization

For many organizations, having multiple API gateways isn’t necessarily an intentional design choice. Instead, it often evolves organically over time as the business scales or adapts to new requirements. Here are a few common scenarios:

Organic Growth Across Teams: Teams select API gateways based on their specific needs, leading to multiple “best-of-breed” gateways operating in parallel.
Mergers and Acquisitions: Companies inherit different API infrastructures and maintain multiple gateways to ensure compatibility and avoid integration disruptions.
Varied Deployment Environments: Different regions require specialized gateways for compliance, data sovereignty, or latency optimization (e.g., GDPR in the EU, domestic payment systems in the U.S.).
Specialized Use Cases: Internal microservices may use lightweight gateways, while customer-facing APIs require advanced features like authentication flows and developer portals.

An API management solution can help manage the complexities of having multiple API gateways by providing a flexible protocol that allows businesses to switch between different gateways without needing to rework their developer portal. This enhances integration and functionality across the organization.

The Problem and Why It Matters

Although multiple gateways can serve unique demands, it quickly becomes tricky to manage. Teams end up with fragmented data on API usage, performance, and developer adoption. Each gateway might provide its own analytics dashboard, making cross-team collaboration and strategic decision-making difficult.

Without a unified view across these gateways, product managers and leadership struggle to see which APIs are truly driving revenue, where traffic is spiking, or how user onboarding differs from one product line to another. In fact, recent research shows that 38% of revenue-generating digital assets in enterprises are API-driven, making visibility across multiple gateways critical. Let’s dive deeper into these challenges and how a consolidated approach can save organizations from operational headaches while unlocking valuable new business insights. A developer portal can help manage these issues by providing a seamless interface with various API gateways, enabling fast key provisioning and integration, and offering a unified view that simplifies the evaluation process for API management solutions.

Challenges of Managing Multiple API Gateways and the Power of Unified API Management

As organizations scale, different teams, business units, or regions may adopt various API gateways based on their unique requirements—whether for performance, security, compliance, or regional deployment. While this flexibility allows for tailored solutions, it also introduces operational inefficiencies, governance inconsistencies, and fragmented data visibility. Without a unified approach, companies struggle to optimize API performance, enforce security policies, and drive monetization strategies effectively. API providers can help manage these challenges by offering centralized solutions that streamline operations, enhance security, and create new revenue streams through various pricing models like pay-per-use and partnerships.

The Hidden Costs of API Fragmentation

Data Silos and Limited Insights

Inconsistent API Metrics: Each gateway provides separate analytics, making it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of API usage, performance, and adoption trends.
Difficult Monetization Tracking: API monetization models vary across gateways, leading to inconsistent revenue tracking and missed optimization opportunities.

Understanding API users can help overcome data silos and gain better insights by enriching user profiles and analyzing API usage alongside revenue and customer success.

Limited Business Visibility and Growth Potential

Unclear API Adoption Metrics: Understanding customer behavior and high-value integrations is challenging when data remains siloed. Tracking API usage growth can help improve business visibility and growth potential by identifying trends and ensuring consistent usage over time.
Hindered API Packaging Strategies: Product managers lack the insights needed to refine pricing tiers, subscription models, and usage-based billing structures.

The Solution: A Unified View for API Management

A unified API management strategy eliminates these challenges by consolidating API analytics, governance, and monetization tools into a single platform. Moesif provides deep visibility into API performance, security, and usage patterns across multiple gateways, empowering teams to make data-driven decisions and maximize API business potential. API management solutions can provide a unified view for API management, offering innovative features and developer portals that are essential for organizations, especially in multi-gateway environments.

Holistic API Observability and Governance

Real-Time API Monitoring: Moesif can aggregate usage and performance metrics from multiple API gateways, enabling rapid issue detection and resolution. Monitoring CPU and memory usage can help in holistic API observability and governance by providing insights into application responsiveness and server health, which are crucial for resource planning and diagnosing performance issues.
Standardized Security Policies: Enforce rate limiting and compliance requirements consistently across all API deployments.

Smarter Monetization and Product Strategy

Cross-Gateway API Insights: Product managers can analyze API adoption, revenue impact, and retention rates in a single unified view within Moesif.
Optimized Pricing and Billing: Gain the intelligence needed to refine monetization models, implement tiered pricing, and maximize API revenue. Understanding the API product lifecycle can further enhance these strategies by providing insights into key performance indicators relevant to business impact and operational success.

Aligning Business Goals with API Strategy

Unified KPI Tracking: Moesif enables organizations to track API performance, customer engagement, and bxusiness impact through a single analytics platform with custom API dashboards.
Scalable API Growth: Centralized visibility into API usage trends supports infrastructure planning and expansion strategies.

With Moesif, companies can transform chaotic, multi-gateway environments into streamlined, data-driven ecosystems that enhance developer experience, improve security, and drive new revenue opportunities.

Unified Analytics Help Product Managers Package and Monetize APIs

When an organization has visibility into who is using their APIs, how they’re using them, and why they’re valuable, it becomes far easier to design effective pricing and packaging strategies. This is where unified analytics across multiple gateways truly shines. Let’s explore how product managers can leverage this holistic data.

Segmenting and Identifying High-Value API Usage

Usage Segmentation: Aggregating data across gateways helps segment usage by customer tiers, feature adoption, or endpoint activity. If enterprise customers heavily rely on a particular API, it may justify premium pricing or SLAs.
Customer Profiling: Understanding which customers generate the highest traffic or revenue allows for better API packaging and monetization strategies.

Optimizing Pricing, Packaging, and Monetization

Subscription vs. Pay-Per-Use: A clear view of API consumption enables Product Managers to choose the right pricing model—subscriptions for predictable costs or pay-per-use for flexibility.
Feature-Based Monetization: Advanced features, such as analytics or premium data, can be placed in higher-tier plans based on real usage data.
Multi-API Bundles & Upsell Paths: Bundling related APIs and tracking usage thresholds can drive upsells, ensuring that developers move into higher tiers when they exceed their limits.

Data-Driven Adjustments and Transparency

Real-Time Optimization: A unified view allows for quick adjustments to pricing and packaging based on under or overutilized features.
Promotional Campaign Tracking: Integrated analytics provide insights into how trials or promotions impact usage, guiding future marketing efforts.
Clear Metering & Billing Transparency: Giving customers visibility into their API usage reduces billing disputes and builds trust, while automated alerts prevent unexpected overages.

A singular view of usage is a powerful enabler for API productization and monetization. It provides the granular insights product managers need to craft compelling offers, set competitive pricing, and nurture stronger relationships with customers.

Key API Metrics: Why a Unified View Matters

Bringing together multiple API gateways under one management framework grants you the power to observe performance, reliability, and revenue-generation in a consistent, holistic way. These key metrics form the bedrock of continuous improvement, helping you spot bottlenecks, optimize resource allocation, and validate strategic decisions. Increased API usage is a key metric for understanding API performance and customer engagement.

Product and Business KPIs

Revenue or Billing Metrics: For monetized APIs, track revenue per call, average revenue per user (ARPU), and churn rates. These metrics can confirm whether your pricing models and product tiers are viable.
Conversion Rates: If you offer freemium or trial tiers, measure how many developers or businesses upgrade to paid plans. This indicates how compelling your paid features are and where you might refine your funnel.
Feature Adoption: Monitor usage of key endpoints or functionalities. Understanding which features gain the most traction guides future roadmap decisions and helps you prioritize improvements that yield the highest ROI.

Adoption and Usage Metrics

API Call Distribution: With multiple gateways, it’s vital to see how traffic is distributed across various services and endpoints. This reveals which APIs are under heavy load or show strong growth potential.
New vs. Returning Developers: A unified view of developer onboarding metrics—like time-to-first-successful-call or repeat usage—indicates how well your APIs retain interest and whether your documentation or portals are effective.
Geographical/Regional Usage: Tracking where calls originate can guide infrastructure decisions (e.g., data center locations) and help you tailor security policies for each region.

Operational Metrics

Latency (Average and Peak): Monitoring response times is crucial for ensuring a seamless end-user experience. High latency can signal underlying issues in either the gateway configurations or your backend services. In fact, Cloudflare’s API Performance Report shows that 57% of internet traffic is now composed of API requests, making speed and efficiency a top priority.
Error Rates: Tracking the frequency and type of errors (4XX, 5XX) helps surface potential configuration problems, code bugs, or external dependencies failing.
Throughput and Request Volume: By understanding how many requests each gateway handles—and during which time frames—you can proactively manage capacity, load balance effectively, and predict scaling needs.

In a multi-gateway environment, relying on fragmented statistics can lead to misinformed decisions. A unified dashboard ensures every team, from product management to engineering, has the data they need to troubleshoot issues, iterate on features, and prove ROI.

Business and Growth: Why You Need a Unified Dashboard

While operational stability and a strong developer experience are vital, most organizations ultimately measure API success by its impact on the bottom line and long-term market positioning. A unified API strategy can serve as a foundation for sustainable growth, allowing product teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than firefighting.

Customer Acquisition and Retention

Targeted Upsell/Cross-Sell: By analyzing usage across gateways, you can identify which customers or partners might benefit from additional API features or higher-tier plans. Automated alerts or in-app notifications can then prompt timely upsells, increasing average revenue per user.
Reduced Churn through Insights: A single pane of glass for customer activity enables quick identification of at-risk accounts—e.g., a sudden drop in API calls could signal dissatisfaction or technical hurdles. Product managers can intervene proactively, offering support or new features to keep users engaged.

Strategic Growth and Market Expansion

Data-Backed Roadmap Decisions: Comprehensive usage data drives more accurate prioritization of new features, expansions, or acquisitions. Leadership can see precisely which APIs or endpoints are fueling growth—and invest accordingly.
Confident Expansion into New Markets: If the data shows strong traction in a specific region or industry, leadership can allocate resources strategically, designing localized solutions or forging new partnerships.
Preparing for Emerging Business Models: Whether it’s launching new subscription tiers or integrating with ecosystem partners, a unified API platform makes it simpler to experiment with—and measure—new revenue models.
Staying Agile in Fast-Changing Markets: Unified metrics and streamlined workflows help your teams pivot quickly in response to market feedback or disruptive trends, ensuring long-term competitiveness.

Cross-Functional Visibility and Scalable Collaboration

Single Source of Truth for Stakeholders: When executives, product managers, and DevOps share the same metrics, conversations shift from “do we have the data?” to “how do we use it?” This alignment empowers better coordination on product strategy, sales, and support.
Bridging Silos in Large Organizations: In multi-division or globally distributed companies, a unified approach ensures that successes and challenges are visible across the organization, reducing duplication of effort and fostering synergy.
Scalable Growth and Future-Proofing: A well-structured API management strategy ensures that teams can scale efficiently, breaking down data silos and creating a foundation for long-term business growth.

Centralized API management isn’t just about operational efficiency; it’s also a strategic growth lever. When teams have clear, unified data on API usage and performance, they can make stronger decisions about product direction, pricing strategies, and market expansion. In the next section, we’ll discuss how these elements come together in real-world scenarios, using unified analytics to maximize both technical efficiency and business ROI.

Conclusion

From the moment an organization deploys its first API gateway to the point where dozens of microservices and product lines are live, the complexity of managing and measuring API usage can grow exponentially. Multiple gateways, each with its own analytics and operational quirks, can easily lead to data silos and fragmented insights. Yet by consolidating these gateways under a single lens, companies unlock new levels of transparency and control.

While each organization’s path to unified API management is unique, the overarching takeaway remains constant: centralizing your API data is a multiplier on success. It nurtures a holistic understanding of user behavior, helps maintain strong SLAs, and aligns teams around shared, data-driven goals.

If you’re exploring solutions in this space, Moesif is capable of providing deep insights into both the operational and business aspects of your APIs. The key is to find tools and processes that facilitate, rather than hinder, your multi-gateway strategy. Sign up today for a free trial, no credit card required.

Deep AI API Observability with Moesif 14 day free trial. No credit card required. Try for Free

API Analytics , API Monitoring , Product Management

Dylan Frankcom

Developer Advocate at Moesif

API Development

Real-time API observability: Using Moesif and Heroku Together

Learn how you can build better API products on Heroku with Moesif by setting up and deploying a Python Django app.

February 26, 2025

API Analytics and Monitoring

Best Practices for Monetizing AI Successfully

Explore several proven monetization strategies for artificial intelligence, from direct monetization to indirect monetization, and shed light on developing a...

February 13, 2025