Collecting custom data with the DataCapture policy

This page applies to Apigeeand Apigee hybrid.

View Apigee Edge documentation.

In addition to the usual API data collected by Apigee , you can also collect custom data using the DataCapture policy. There are two main steps required, as described in the following sections:

1. Create a Data Collector REST resource .
2. Specify the data you want to collect using the DataCapture policy's <Collect> element.

Create a Data Collector REST resource

To use the DataCapture policy, you must first create a Data Collector REST resource. To do so, send an API request like the following:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-access-token)" -X POST -H "content-type:application/json" \
  -d '
{
  "name": "dc_my_custom_data",
  "description": "Collects data for analysis.",
  "type": "STRING",
}' \
  "https://apigee.googleapis.com/v1/organizations/$PROJECT_ID/datacollectors"

This creates a resource named dc_my_custom_data , which you can use with the DataCapture policy.

Specify the data to collect

You can specify the data to collect using the DataCapture policy's <Collect> element. There are various ways to do this, as shown in the Examples section in the DataCapure reference page. One way is to specify a flow variable , which stores data passed in API requests and responses. For example, you could collect data that customers enter in a web page form using the flow variable message.formparam. param_name .values , where param_name is the name of a parameter in the form. Suppose the form has a parameter named payment_amount . The corresponding flow variable would be message.formparam.payment_amount.values .

The following code specifies this variable by the ref attribute of the <Collect> element.

<DataCapture name="capturepayment">
    <Capture>
        <DataCollector>dc_my_custom_data</DataCollector>
        <Collect ref="message.form_param.payment_amount.values" >
    </Capture>
</DataCapture>

With this setting, the data entered in the form's payment_amount field will be collected by DataCapture and stored in a variable named dc_my_custom_data .

Creating a custom report from data collected with DataCapture

Once you have set up data collection with the DataCapture policy, you can use the data to create a custom report by the procedure described in Adding a custom report . To do so, when you select a metric for the report, as shown in step 4 of the procedure , choose the variable that has the same name as the Data Collector REST resource you created for DataCapture—for example, dc_my_custom_data .

You can also use the same variable as a dimension in a custom report. Since dimensions group data by the values of the variable, it is usually preferable for the variable to be a string that only takes on a limited number of values.