Apigee Sense

Apigee Sense is designed to protect APIs from unwanted and malicious request traffic. This tool integrates with Apigee Edge to analyze API request metadata, identifying patterns that may indicate suspicious or unwanted activity.

Technically, Apigee Sense employs a collection engine that gathers metadata from API calls, including source and target information, request content, response status, and timing details. This metadata is then analyzed in batches to detect patterns such as automated behavior, persistent attempts from the same IP, unusual error rates, and geographical anomalies. The analysis results are presented in the Apigee Sense console, where users can review and take action on suspicious traffic, such as blocking, flagging, or allowing specific requests.

Operationally, Apigee Sense relies on adaptive algorithms that are tuned with data from multiple datasets, enhancing the accuracy of legitimate traffic identification. However, this approach can sometimes lead to elevated latencies, as observed in some service incidents. Users need to monitor the performance and adjust settings accordingly to balance detection accuracy and response times.

Key technical details include the ability to filter requests based on various criteria such as geography, autonomous system organization, and predefined reasons (e.g., "content robber" patterns). Actions can be taken at the IP address level, with options to block requests, add special HTTP headers, or allow traffic to proceed. Despite its robust capabilities, Apigee Sense may experience occasional service issues, such as network connectivity problems or UI loading failures, which need to be monitored through service health dashboards.