Azure API Management Capacity Metric

This article will talk about the Capacity Metric, which is one of the critical metrics for Azure API Management. Capacity Metric shows the utilization of your API Management instances, which helps you decide the best strategy to upgrade/scale your APIM instance.

Sometimes you'll find yourself need to upgrade your APIM instance to a higher level. As you may already know, APIM comes with different tiers (Developer, Basic, Standard, Premium, Consumption). Each tier supports certain computing resources and networking features. Upgrading your APIM instance to a higher tier will provide your APIM instance with more computing power and would drop the utilization of the capacity metric for your APIM instance.

Or sometimes, it might be more efficient to provision multiple instances of your APIM instead of just having one APIM instance on a high tier. It's a scaling out approach across multiple instances rather than scaling up a single instance. This approach works best when you've clients around the world that need to access your APIs. In this case, it would be practical to have multiple APIM instances in different regions. Direct clients to use the APIM instance that is geographically closer to them (to reduce network latency), rather than directing all API requests to a single powerful APIM instance in one region.