Kong Gateway Monitoring with Atatus | Comprehensive API Monitoring

Why Kong Gateway Monitoring with Atatus Matters?

Real-time visibility into Kong Gateway is essential to detect and resolve API issues before they impact users. Atatus delivers in-depth monitoring of traffic, latency, and failures across your API ecosystem. It empowers teams to optimize performance, detect anomalies, and strengthen API security.

Real-Time API Traffic Monitoring

Monitor every API request passing through Kong Gateway in real time. Track request volume, HTTP methods, response status codes, and throughput to ensure APIs are running efficiently. Identify traffic spikes and prevent bottlenecks before they impact users.

API Performance & Latency Insights

Analyze API response times and identify performance bottlenecks instantly. Monitor latency metrics (avg, p95, p99), and slow endpoints to optimize API performance. Detect whether delays originate from Kong, backend services, or network issues.

API Usage Analytics

Gain deep insights into how your users interact with your APIs. identify popular endpoints, track API traffic trends over time, and analyze geographic usage patterns. Understand request volumes across different services to optimize API scalability.

Failure Tracking

Identify and debug API failures with detailed error tracking. Monitor failed requests, analyze error trends, and capture request payloads for better troubleshooting. Full stack trace logging helps engineers quickly pinpoint and resolve issues.

Security & Anomaly Detection

Protect your APIs from unauthorized access and malicious activity. Detect abnormal traffic patterns, track failed authentication attempts, and monitor API key misuse. Identify rate-limiting violations and suspicious IP activity to strengthen API security.

FAQs on API Analytics Using Kong Gateway and Atatus

1. What is Kong API monitoring and why is it important?

Kong API monitoring refers to tracking the performance, and usage of APIs managed through Kong Gateway. It helps teams detect issues early, measure latency, and understand usage patterns through Kong API analytics. Monitoring is essential to ensure high availability, performance, and security across your APIs. Without it, bottlenecks, failures, or anomalies could go unnoticed, impacting both end users and backend systems.

2. How do I monitor Kong Gateway using Atatus?

Atatus API Analytics provides deep insights into API traffic by capturing API calls, user behavior, and trends across your Kong Gateway. It enables tracking of API usage by individual users or companies, monitors errors, and supports advanced filtering and segmentation for debugging and analytics. Atatus also offers real-time alerts, API monetization insights, and retention tracking, helping you optimize your API strategies effectively.

3. What are the best tools for monitoring Kong APIs?

Some of the best Kong observability tools include:

Atatus – for comprehensive real-time monitoring, API analytics, latency tracking, and failure analysis.
Prometheus & Grafana – great for custom metrics and visualizations in Kong Gateway monitoring setups.
Kong Vitals – offers built-in API metrics and charts.
OpenTelemetry – used for exporting telemetry data from Kong to various backends.

Each tool offers unique strengths in visualizing Kong API Gateway metrics and traffic.

4. What metrics should I monitor in Kong API Gateway?

Key Kong API Gateway metrics you should track include:

Request Volume – to measure traffic flow and detect usage spikes.
Latency Metrics (avg, p95, p99) – to understand API responsiveness.
HTTP Status Codes – to track success, failures, and redirects.
Throughput – to measure API payload capacity over time.
API Errors & Stack Traces – to debug failed requests.
Security Events – such as rate-limiting violations or failed authentication attempts.

These API monitoring metrics ensure reliable performance, scalability, and security of your APIs.

5. What are the key benefits of using API Analytics in Kong, especially when integrated with observability tools like Atatus?

Integrating Atatus with Kong Gateway is seamless and efficient. Here is a quick look at how it works and why it’s optimized for performance and flexibility:

1. Visibility into API Usage

Understand which APIs are most/least used.
Track usage by user, application, or company.
Identify usage patterns and trends over time.

2. Error and Anomaly Detection

Detect spikes in 4xx/5xx errors in real-time.
Identify failing endpoints and root causes quickly.
Get alerted on abnormal behaviors or API abuse.

3. Performance Monitoring

Measure request latency (avg, p95, p99), throughput, and response time.
Find slow endpoints and optimize them.
Correlate performance with backend services.

4. Business Insights

Understand user retention and engagement by API.
Segment users based on usage for personalized experiences.
Discover monetization opportunities through usage analytics.

5. Data-Driven Decision Making

Back product decisions with real API usage data.
Prioritize features based on how customers use the API.
Align engineering and business goals with measurable KPIs.

6. Security and Compliance

Monitor for suspicious traffic or bot attacks.
Audit access patterns for compliance requirements.
Identify misused or deprecated APIs.

6. How to monitor APIs using Kong Gateway?

To monitor APIs in Kong Gateway, you can:

Enable monitoring/logging plugins like Atatus.
Track critical API Gateway metrics – latency, status codes, errors, and throughput.
Use dashboards from Kong API analytics tool like Atatus
Set up alerts for performance drops or failures.

This setup gives you real-time visibility into your API behavior, helping with optimization and troubleshooting.

You're in good company.

You don't have to trust our word. Hear what our customers say!

Atatus is a great product with great support. Super easy to integrate, it automatically hooks into everything. The support team and dev team were also very helpful in fixing a bug and updating the docs.

Tobias L

Full Stack Engineer, ClearVoyage

Atatus is powerful, flexible, scalable, and has assisted countless times to identify issues in record time. With user identification, insight into XHR requests to name a few it is the monitoring tool we choose for our SPAs.

Jan-Paul B

Chief Executive Officer, iSavta

Atatus continues to deliver useful features based on customer feedback. Atatus support team has been responsive and gave visibility into their timeline of requested features.