API management checklist

A summary, with links, of the key tasks for managing APIs in IBM® API Connect.

Task	Description
Activate your API Manager user account	For you to be able to connect to a Management server by using the API Manager user interface, one or other of the following prerequisites must be satisfied: Your administrator has created a provider organization, specifying you as the owner; see Creating a provider organization. You have been added as a member of a provider organization; see Adding provider organization users and assigning roles.
Log in to the API Manager user interface	After you have activated your account, you can log in to your Management server from the API Manager user interface.
Configure your Catalogs	APIs are published to a Catalog to make them available to application developers. The URLs for API calls, and for the Developer Portal, are specific to a particular Catalog. By default, a sandbox Catalog is provided for API testing, but you can create your own Catalogs; for example, a production Catalog for hosting APIs that are ready for full use.
Manage the membership of your Catalogs	You can add users to your Catalogs, and assign roles and permissions to control their level of access.
Configure API security	You can configure user registries of various types for authenticating API access, TLS profiles for securing data transmission over HTTPS, and OAuth providers for securing third-party website or application access to APIs.
Manage your Products	Move your Products through their lifecycle, from initially staging a Product to a Catalog, through to publishing to make the Product version available to your application developers, and to eventual retiring and archiving. You can also display analytics information, and control who can see or subscribe to your Products.
Analyze your API usage	You can use IBM API Connect to filter, sort, and aggregate your API event data. You can present the results within correlated charts, tables, and maps to help you manage service levels, set quotas, establish controls, set up security policies, manage communities, and analyze trends.
Manage user access to your provider organization	You can add users to your provider organization, remove users, and assign roles and permissions.
Partition your Catalogs into Spaces for syndication	With the syndication feature, you can partition your Catalogs into Spaces. Each Space is used by a different API provider development team and has its own set of management capabilities relating specifically to the APIs that the associated team publishes to that Space, enabling each team to manage their APIs independently.