Today’s web and mobile applications depend on a wide range of backend APIs to make them function, but staying in control of these external systems is a huge pain point. To help application developers with this challenge, 3SCALE, the leading API management platform, today announced the private beta launch of APItools. The product allows developers to quickly and easily track and monitor all of an application’s API traffic. It also includes the capability to transform and modify inbound and outbound traffic, as well as analyze flows to detect peaks and problems. APItools is a free service launching in private beta today with signup at http://www.apitools.com/.

By helping application developers interact with APIs, 3SCALE aims to continue removing barriers to API adoption, and help unleash their value. APItools will save developers using APIs valuable time in learning how an API works, allowing them to easily test and debug their app, and provide simpler way to transform traffic, and use middleware keys and headers. Operations teams will benefit from APItools ability to easily monitor their API endpoint/methods, control all traffic for different apps in one place, and set up tests/alerts for errors.

“As the API industry continues to evolve, developers increasingly depend on APIs for applications to function but managing the dependencies this creates can be extremely time consuming. Over time we’ve built internal tools to help do this and APItools makes these accessible to others for use,” said Steve Willmott, CEO of 3SCALE.  “The launch of APITools is our latest effort to bring APIs to the mainstream and help both API providers and developers realize their value without the friction that exists today.”

“I’ve been using APItools internally to track API Traffic and at hackathons for projects and it’s great to have this visibility and control,” said Nicolas Grenie, one of 3SCALE’s developer evangelists. “Although there are a lot of tools out there to manage APIs as a provider, if you’re a developer using those APIs there is little available, so it’s great that we can release this for wider use.”