Monitoring Overview

API gateways isolate your applications from the outside world and provide critical path protection for your upstream services. Understanding the state of your API gateway system is critical to providing reliable API-based systems.

There are many monitoring and alerting systems available, and Kong Gateway integrates with multiple solutions:

• Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. Prometheus provides a multi-demensional time series data model and query language. The Monitoring with Prometheus guide shows how to install and configure the Kong Gateway Prometheus plugin.
• Datadog is a popular cloud based infrastructure and application monitoring service. See the Collect Metrics with Datadog guide for information on integrating Kong Gateway with Datadog. You can also integrate the Datadog plugin with Kong Gateway for additional insights.
• StatsD is a lightweight network daemon that listens for application metrics on UDP or TCP and sends aggregated values to one or more backend services. Kong Gateway directly supports StatsD with the StatsD plugin. Monitoring with StatsD provides a step-by-step guide to enabling StatsD.
• For monitoring when Kong Gateway is ready to accept requests, use the built-in Node Readiness endpoint.

Closely related to monitoring is tracing. See the Kong Gateway Tracing Reference for details about instrumenting your API gateway.