I'm building an API analytics dashboard with usage and SLA tracking, what should I use?

For an API analytics dashboard with usage + SLA tracking, you usually want a stack that covers 4 things:

1. Event collection from your API gateway/app
2. Metrics storage for time-series data
3. Dashboards/visualization
4. Alerting/SLA reporting

Good options by setup

If you want the simplest “build it yourself” stack

• API gateway / reverse proxy: Kong, NGINX, Traefik, Apigee, AWS API Gateway
• Metrics: Prometheus
• Dashboards: Grafana
• Logs: Loki or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch
• Tracing: OpenTelemetry + Jaeger or Tempo

This is a very common setup if you want:

• request counts
• latency p95/p99
• error rates
• uptime/SLA/SLO tracking
• per endpoint / per customer / per API key analytics

If you want SaaS and less ops

• Datadog
• New Relic
• Grafana Cloud
• Honeycomb
• Elastic Cloud

These are great if you want:

• fast setup
• built-in dashboards
• alerting
• service level objectives
• logs + metrics + traces in one place

If your main goal is API product analytics

If you need per-consumer usage, quotas, API key analytics, monetization, and customer-facing reporting, look at:

• Kong Konnect
• Apigee
• Moesif
• Tyk
• 3scale

These are stronger than generic observability tools for:

• developer/customer usage reports
• top endpoints
• consumer-level analytics
• plan/quota tracking
• API business metrics

What I’d recommend

For engineering/SLA monitoring:

• OpenTelemetry + Prometheus + Grafana
• Add Loki for logs and Tempo/Jaeger for tracing

For API product/business analytics:

• Add Moesif or use Apigee/Kong/Tyk/3scale depending on your gateway needs

Metrics you should track

For the dashboard, make sure you can show:

• total requests
• requests by endpoint / method / customer / API key
• success vs error rate
• latency percentiles: p50, p95, p99
• throughput (RPS)
• status code breakdown
• uptime / availability %
• SLA attainment over time
• rate limit hits / quota usage
• retries/timeouts
• top clients and top endpoints

SLA/SLO tracking tip

Don’t just track “uptime.” Define:

• SLI: measured metric, like % of successful requests under 300ms
• SLO: target, like 99.9% of requests succeed and <300ms
• SLA: contractual promise, often backed by credits

Practical recommendation by company stage

• Startup / lean team: Grafana Cloud or Datadog
• Need full control: OpenTelemetry + Prometheus + Grafana
• API platform business: Moesif + gateway analytics or Apigee/Kong/Tyk

If you tell me:

1. your cloud/provider,
2. whether this is internal or customer-facing,
3. expected traffic volume,
4. and whether you need per-customer billing/quota analytics,

I can suggest a more exact stack.