Best practices for monitoring and managing Gnip product usage

By
Thursday, 31 March 2016

As Gnip customers consume billions of social activities every month through the Gnip platform, it’s critical they’re able to easily understand how much data they’re consuming. This information is a key input into capacity planning for new products, understanding how onboarding new customers affects existing data consumption patterns, and how one-time projects may have different data needs than “business as usual.”

We have several different tools to help customers monitor usage, and we’re excited to announce a new version of our Usage API, which customers can use to programmatically monitor consumption on an up-to-the-minute basis.

Usage API 2.0

Customers using Gnip’s core APIs to consume social data can now take advantage of our new Usage API 2.0 to programmatically access their activity consumption across these products. This API enables customers to build custom triggers and logic around the usage thresholds that matter most to their business. It is the most important and best tool for helping monitor and manage usage of Gnip products. The Usage API 2.0 has been rebuilt from the ground up alongside other Gnip 2.0 products in order to provide customers with reliable, sustainable, and complete access to usage information.

With the Usage API 2.0, you can power internal dashboards, detect unexpected spikes in usage, and identify changes in customer behavior to better plan your capacity over the short and long term. The Usage API 2.0 is available at no cost to all Gnip customers. To get started, check out our technical documentation.

In addition to the Usage API, Gnip provides several other tools to help you better monitor and manage your usage.

Usage data in the Gnip Console

The Gnip Console provides a dashboard interface to usage data. It’s best used for periodic check-ins by business stakeholders and/or comparing month-over-month or day-over-day usage. Note that some of the more granular data that are available via the Usage API aren’t available via the Console. To learn more about the Gnip Console, check out our technical documentation.

Usage caps

If you absolutely don’t want to consume more than a specific amount of data, your account manager can place a monthly “cap” on these for you. This hard cap will completely disable access to any/all products reliant on this data once the limit is hit. To learn more about usage caps or to put one in place, contact your account manager.

Usage thresholds & notification emails

If you’d like to receive an email notification when you reach specific usage thresholds, you can set this up through your the Console account. A user with the account admin role can configure two different thresholds levels for your account — warning and critical.

Individual users on the account have the ability to subscribe to the associated notification emails (or the admin can subscribe users on their behalf). An account admin can even create email-only users who would receive such notifications without setting up access to the Console. Please keep in mind, as with any email, they are subject to being spam filtered or buried in your inbox. As a matter of best practice we encourage you to use these emails in conjunction with the tools above. To lean more, check out our technical documentation.

As a Gnip customer, better understanding how you’re using the APIs we deliver can help you create a better experience for your customers. Be sure to check out each of the tools in this post and think about how they can help you better manage your systems. If you have any questions, contact your account manager or email data-sales@twitter.com.