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API Inventory provides a curated view of your organization's APIs, allowing you to document, classify, and maintain a living catalog of your API landscape. Once APIs are automatically observed, monitored, and cataloged by API Discovery, API Inventory lets you decide which APIs matter to your organization and add the context that makes them useful. Once you've saved APIs to your inventory from the Discovery tab, you can manage and organize them from the Inventory tab.

Before you begin

API Inventory requires API Discovery to be enabled and actively collecting traffic on your service. You should have APIs appearing in the Discovery view before you begin building your inventory. Our guide to using API discovery provides more information on how to do this.

About the API Inventory tab

The API Inventory tab displays your curated list of API operations from your API Discovery list, along with their associated attributes. Collected API attributes include the domain, the URL path, the HTTP method, the tags you've applied to that API, and the timestamp of the last time a request matching this particular API operation's attributes was discovered.

Viewing inventoried APIs

The API Inventory tab allows you to view inventoried APIs in two ways: table view and tree view. You can switch between these views at any time without affecting the underlying data.

About the views

Table view displays APIs as a flat, searchable table with one row per unique combination of domain, URL path, and HTTP method. This view is useful when you want to quickly scan all APIs at once, see recent activity with chronological sorting, or search for specific keywords.

Tree view organizes APIs hierarchically by domain, URL path segments, and HTTP method. This searchable view groups related endpoints together based on your API resource structure, making it easier to:

• navigate through large collections of APIs by their logical organization.
• identify all endpoints and operations associated with a specific resource or domain.
• understand the relationship between different API endpoints.
• surface older APIs that may not appear at the top of the chronologically-sorted list view.

For example, if your API Inventory has captured endpoints from both production (api.example.com) and staging (staging-api.example.com) environments, tree view groups them by domain and path structure:

api.example.com/
  └─ v1/
     ├─ inventory/
     |  └─ GET
     │  └─ item/
     │     └─ info/
     │        ├─ GET
     │        └─ DELETE
     └─ system/
        └─ health/
           └─ GET

staging-api.example.com/
  └─ v1/
     └─ inventory/
        └─ item/
           └─ POST

This hierarchical organization reflects your own API architecture, making it easier to locate specific endpoints when working with large collections of inventoried APIs.

Switching between table view and tree view

To switch between table view and tree view:

1. Navigate to Security > API Discovery in the Fastly control panel.
2. Click the Inventory tab.
3. Click the table view () or tree view () icons at the top of the API Inventory tab.

The view preference is saved for your session. All search, filter, and export functionality works in both views.

Viewing inventoried API details

To view details about an API that's been inventoried:

1. Navigate to Security > API Discovery in the Fastly control panel.
2. Click the Inventory tab.
3. From the services menu, select the appropriate service.
4. (Optional) Filter the list of inventoried APIs by selecting a specific tag from the Tag menu. By default, all tags are selected.
5. Click View to the right of the relevant inventoried API. The Operation details page appears.

Editing and tagging inventoried API details

To edit the details of an inventoried API, including adding tags it:

1. Navigate to Security > API Discovery in the Fastly control panel.
2. Click the Inventory tab.
3. Find the API you want to edit in the list that appears.
4. Click View to the right of the relevant inventoried API. The Operation details page appears.
5. Click Edit operation.
6. In the Description field, update the description of this API.
7. From the Tag field, select or enter the appropriate tags to apply to this API. You can also create new tags if a tag you need doesn't exist yet.
8. Click Save. Your changes are saved and reflected in the API list.

Removing APIs from the Inventory

To remove an API from the inventory:

1. Navigate to Security > API Discovery in the Fastly control panel.
2. Click the Inventory tab.
3. Find the API you want to remove in the list that appears.
4. Click View to the right of the relevant inventoried API. The Operation details page appears.
5. Click Remove operation.
6. Click Confirm and remove. The API is removed from your inventory.

Exporting inventoried APIs

To export your API reference:

1. Navigate to Security > API Discovery in the Fastly control panel.
2. Click the Inventory tab.
3. Click Export to download your inventoried APIs as a CSV file.

The exported CSV includes all APIs in your inventory along with all the context you've added: domains, paths, methods, descriptions, tags, and notes.

Related content

• API Discovery API documentation