API Management

Frends includes built-in API management features that you can easily use to create and manage your APIs. With the provided tools, you can create an API using OpenAPI specification, link a Process into each endpoint and then, using our low-code Process Editor, create the logic behind each endpoint. Alternatively, the APIs can be specified as passthrough APIs, where Frends will connect the public endpoint in Frends to another API endpoint in your target system.

The provided monitoring tools will give you wide access to checking and filtering the logs for incoming requests for each Environment. If, and when, you want to limit who can access your APIs, our powerful API Policies provide a plethora of settings that you can use to authenticate and authorize callers to your endpoints. And finally, to get a word out that you have a new API, the API Portal will show your users exactly what your API can do.

API Specification

The API Management page in Control Panel is the central management view for all of your APIs. From here, you can create new APIs by providing an OpenAPI specification for it, and then creating a new Process or linking an existing Process to each endpoint you have specified in the spec.

To learn more about creating APIs with Frends, head over to How to create an API with Frends.

Passthrough APIs

Passthrough APIs allow you to forward requests from the Frends API endpoints to your system's provided APIs, in the case where data conversion or other logic is not needed. They are excellent to use to keep a coherence in your API branding, having all used endpoints within the same domain, without requiring much configuration or overhead from requiring to create a Process in between where nothing really happens.

To configure a passthrough API, you need to have created an API to Frends, and then click Create passthrough API button in API management view. In the passthrough API editor, you can specify the target url for each API endpoint, optionally passing along parts of the original request's url or query parameters, as well as manage the headers used in the passthrough.

You can also create an All endpoints passthrough, which will always pass on the final part of the request path and query parameters to the target API without having all possible endpoints defined in the API specification. The original url and path are replaced with the target system's url and path.

API Policies

API Policies are used to authenticate API callers as well as manage the logging and throttling options for the endpoints.

API Policies allow you to define the targeted API endpoints that the policy applies to. It can also target the endpoints through implicit wildcard if only the beginning of a URL is specified.

Read more about API Policies here.

API Monitoring

In order to monitor what is happening with your Frends APIs, the API monitoring page shows you all the connections made into your tenant, and what happened with them.

You can easily filter the log by API operation, status code of the response, and what method was used, to figure out what is happening. The logs include events for all requests made against your tenant, and not only the specified API endpoints, so you can also see all the unsolicited attempts made against your environment.