Axiom lets Unkey hone product-market fit visually and painlessly

Takeaways:

About Unkey

Unkey, founded in 2023, redefines API-building for developers with a fast, scalable, and straightforward solution to help developers secure, manage, and scale their APIs. The platform enables developers to add authentication, analytics, and rate-limiting to their APIs in minutes. With a focus on an easy-to-use permission system and a new gateway system, Unkey aims to bring developers a new level of API scalability.

The challenge: A new company needs both monitoring and product-market analysis

CEO James Perkins and his cofounder Andreas Thomas had the idea that API provisioning for developers should be turnkey easy to build an API, add keys, set rate limits, analyze usage, etc., and be able to stay on top of it as adoption scales. “API management didn’t make sense unless you had a Ph.D. in DevOps,” James says, and developers were wary of the price and possible risks of commerical API gateways. The pair began an open-source side project, then found that investors were more than eager to fund them to turn it into their full-time jobs.

Unkey’s stack is ample but not unusual. The front end is React driven by Next.js. “For our backend stack,” James says, “it's a mixture of things. We have some Go, which is built in containers, and then we have serverless functions through Cloudflare, using workers, durable objects, and a bunch of pieces from Cloudflare to help that. We use PlanetScale for our database. and Tinybird to drive all the analytics in real time to our users.”

Unkey’s engineers didn’t have a pain point for which they reached for Axiom to soothe. Rather, from past experience and friends’ recommendations, they brought in Axiom at the start to avoid the investment and time of building an observability stack as their previous companies had done. James was skeptical of many o11y tools: “They’re where events go to die. They’re the point solution for a specific problem, but you can’t easily get that event data back out. We wanted Axiom as this connected system so we can actually plug and play with other services.”

The solution: Turnkey observability, customer journey studies — plus key company metrics

Setting up Axiom with the basics of monitoring and observability was a Day One feat for the team once they realized how easy Axiom’s dashboards are to spin up. Rather than wait for incidents to happen, and then set up monitors to watch for the next occurence, they set up dashboards and alerts for every key metric they could think of. “It lets us do heavy lifting without the heavy lifting,” James says.

Among the dashboards they’ve set up:

• Vercel telemetry logs: Engineers can send structured logs directly from their code, then use Axiom’s Smart Filters to drill down on a project or deployment, and Quick Queries for one-click insights on function performance.
• Cloudflare website performance: Much easier in Axiom than in Cloudflare. “These errors we were getting – without Axiom we wouldn’t even know they exist,” James says.
• API stats: Axiom monitors requests, max latency, service latency, what paths are being used and how often in the past day.

The dashboards let Unkey engineers know about customer problems, such as API errors, before the customers report them. “When they come to us and say, ‘we’re having this issue,’ we already have an inkling of what’s happening — service latency and things like that.”

Customer journeys and product use

Having 100% of events at hand lets Unkey go beyond engineering needs. They can see at a glance who their newest customers are, and check to see what they’re doing with the product. It’s easy enough to spin up a dashboard for one specific customer. If they drop off, the team will see that they have and can look at why that might have been.

But James’ favorite is the usage dashboard. “It tracks all our usage through the entire product,” he says. “How many rate limits are being done? How many verifications through keys are being done? Who are our top performers? Hmm, this one workspace is doing a lot more than everybody else. Who are they, and what are they doing?”

For now Unkey uses Tinybird to provide customers with their own data, but with Axiom as a single source — with no extra fees beyond the original ingest of events — they’re open to serving Axiom-routed data to customers, the way AI platforms Salad and Hypermode repurpose their massive ingests of customer-generated logs back into their own product screens.

Dashboards for business health

The usage dashboard also allows James to quickly prepare reports about Unkey as a business. “It gives me a lot of ammo to talk to founders or VCs, or just talk about the general health of the company,” he says. Being the CEO, I need to drive that stuff.”

Axiom has proven an accessible, effective tool not only for Unkey’s observability and monitoring needs, but to help James and his team study and hone their product-market fit by observing customer behavior and collecting stats without a slot. He recommends it not only for engineers, but for executives: “Even if you’re a business person, building custom dashboards is super useful. You can click a button and have the data you need in hand.”

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