How Oxolo Scaled API Analytics for Generative AI-based Media

Overview

Oxolo is a Generative-AI company that creates video advertisements for products through a single API call. Using synthetic media generation, e‑commerce providers can rapidly create product videos, advertisements and social media without incurring the delay and expense of hiring a video production team.

By simply sharing a product-listing’s URL, Oxolo’s AI generates a full video advertisement; from storyboarding to acting and production, whilst incorporating a lifelike avatar. Users can make edits to the video before exporting and embedding on their e‑commerce website.

While AI videos are not a new concept, through their well‑designed microservices architecture, Oxolo has pushed the boundaries of AI, and serves videos quickly and efficiently through a simple API call.

Challenge

As demand increased, CTO Oliver Borchers wanted to have more visibility and control over what went on over Oxolo’s APIs, as well as understand his customers’ experiences. He needed an API analytics tool that would let his team triage customer issues quickly and in real time. To be proactive in their customer success, Oliver knew that Oxolo needed full API visibility so as to truly see relevant issues.

To fully understand API activity, Oxolo also needed a tool that allowed custom metric and payload selection. For their engineers to take an active approach to customer issues, they needed an API analytics platform that sucked in real‑time data. And for greater clarity into how people interacted with their product, they needed to track user actions and API calls via internal dashboards. In short, Oxolo wanted to understand and control their internal and external APIs with custom, relevant metrics.

From my experience in developing software, having well‑designed microservices with publicly exposed interfaces and privately owned interfaces, allows for you to gain flexibility and modularity. You gain single responsibility. And that's why we've become an API‑first company.

Dr. Oliver Borchers, CTO

Solution

Understanding their API health and user behavior with custom metrics and surfacing insights with dashboards has helped them to debug their API more efficiently.

While researching options on API gateways, CTO Oliver Borchers, identified Moesif as a monitoring tool which could possibly help Oxolo. Before testing Moesif, Oxolo didn’t find another suitable analytics platform that fit their needs.

They found integrating Moesif with their current gateway solution to be quick and simple.

Oxolo’s initial use case for Moesif is as a debugging tool. Oxolo’s engineering team examines metrics, such as latency by endpoint and total traffic, to understand how users are interacting with their API.

As time has gone on, Oxolo has used Moesif to examine metrics regarding caching, to understand how many requests from certain services are actually served from a cache — metrics that are relevant for building their service and understanding cost structures. Before Moesif, Oxolo was unable to clearly see the full distribution of response types over a given period of time. By integrating Moesif into their current tech stack, Oxolo has been able to track business metrics, and thus better guide their internal decisions around cost metrics for specific services.

CloudWatch Substitute

Oxolo originally thought Moesif would only handle API monitoring, but after implementation they realized that Moesif could also be a Cloudwatch substitute. By focusing on custom metrics, and building dashboards around them, Oxolo is able to surface relevant payload statistics to their engineers. This has helped them stay on top of debugging, employing a preventative, rather than reactionary, workflow. Their customer support team is also more proactive, addressing issues thanks to the real‑time insights visible in Moesif’s customizable dashboards.

I found Moesif extremely useful for monitoring purposes, because I always like to have lots of visibility and control over what is going through the API. And that’s when I realized what a great tool Moesif would be, not just for user behavior, but for global API monitoring as well.

Dr. Oliver Borchers, CTO

API Monitoring

While Oxolo mostly relies on Moesif for their gateway implementation and debugging tools, the metrics that matter for their API product are also aggregated and analyzed by Moesif.

Oxolo examines the distribution of responses over time to discover issues early on. Their customers generate thousands of videos, with some of the primary users of their service requesting hundreds of thousands of AI generated videos a year. These users come in through a combination of API calls and people working in the Oxolo video suite itself. Oxolo relies on Moesif to stay on top of the success of their customers, as well as capture internal errors and status code returns. Being able to analyze and monitor their global traffic allows Oxolo to stay on top of their power users’ needs.

Oxolo is able to remain ahead of any API issues as well as their customer’s needs thanks to Moesif. Moesif is not just an observation tool, it is a business accelerator. By focusing on the metrics that are relevant to their API product, Oxolo ignores vanity metrics and is instead able to make meaningful changes to their APIs, integrations, and customer experience.

Business Insights at the User Level Spur Growth

Oxolo also tracks business metrics to understand the health of the overall company. For example, the number of videos delivered versus how many are still waiting to be processed, is used as a proxy for system performance or configuration efficiently.

By tracking down to the individual level, Oxolo has been able to understand their users’ behavior and needs more accurately than before. As they continue to scale, they’re confident in their ability to refine their business strategy thanks to Moesif’s deep, user‑centric analytics.

As a startup, Oxolo wanted the most accurate solution to suit their development needs, in order to make data‑driven business decisions early on. They were impressed with Moesif’s ability to fit into their current analytics stack with minimal integration effort. Thanks to Moesif, Oxolo is able to exercise full observability over their API integrations and have a tighter grasp on new issues and bugs.

We found Moesif early on in the discovery process, and found the integration with our existing solution was so incredibly easy. Honestly, we didn't bother searching for other providers. The barrier of entry for Moesif was so low and the value was so great, there was just no reason to find an alternative.

Dr. Oliver Borchers, CTO

Summary

Utilizing Moesif, Oxolo has turned their API product into a self‑service business. To become an API‑first company, Oxolo needed an API analytics platform that would give them full visibility over their APIs and integrations, as well as offer the flexibility of customizable metrics. Moesif enables Oxolo to be proactive and make business decisions based on real‑time user data. By understanding their API users, Oxolo has shortened the response time for 400/500 errors and created more value for their customers. Although they initially turned to Moesif to guide their API observability, Oxolo has become a true API‑first company with a product-led strategy thanks to Moesif.