API discovery

Use API discovery to discover the APIs in your organization, and copy them into API drafts to enable lifecycle management.

IBM® API Connect includes an API discovery capability that enables you to quickly discover the APIs in your organization. You can then easily copy the APIs that you want to work with into API drafts, so that they can be fully managed within API Connect. API discovery uses data source collectors that are configured to integrate with gateways and ingresses to give you the visibility of the API traffic in your networks. The logs from this traffic are forwarded to the discovery capability, analyzed, and then API documents are generated and presented for review. These generated API documents can then be copied to draft APIs as required, to enable full lifecycle management.

The following types of data source collectors are supported:
  • GitHub
  • DataPower® API Gateway proxy
  • OpenTelemetry
Restriction: The following limitations apply to the API discovery capability.
  • The API discovery capability is available only in the API Manager UI. It's not available in the API Designer UI.
  • The toolkit CLI can be used for operations on the discovered APIs and sources, but not on configuring the collectors.
See the following topics for detailed information about how to configure and run API discovery.
  1. Configure one or more data source collectors for discovering APIs:
  2. Discover and review the APIs that are collected. See Reviewing your discovered APIs.
  3. Manage the lifecycle of your discovered APIs. See The API discovery lifecycle in API Manager.