Label Management

Labels in Traceable categorize APIs, services, backends, and third-parties for easier management and tracking. You can use these labels to apply custom tags to related APIs or filter specific data within the platform. For example, you can label APIs by functionality, environment, severity, and authentication. These labels help efficiently monitor and report data in your application ecosystem.

Label management is the process of creating rules and labels to tag the API endpoints, services, backends, and third-parties. This process consists of two components:

• Labels — Create labels to categorize your data. You can select these labels while creating rules, or on the Catalog → Inventory page.

• Rules — Create labeling rules that allow Traceable to automatically add labels to data if your defined conditions match the incoming traffic.

The following sections discuss the steps to create labels and rules and, using examples, how you can use them to monitor data.

Labels

Labels are metadata tags you can use to classify and organize your APIs. This helps streamline API monitoring and efficiently respond to critical ones.

Navigate to Settings → API Catalog → Label Management → Labels tab, and complete the following steps to create a label:

1. Click + Create Label.

2. In the Create Label pop-up, specify the following:
   

   • Name — The name of the label, for example, PCI DSS.

   • Description (Optional) — A description for the label.

   • Color (Optional) — A color you wish to assign to the label. For example, Red.

3. Click Confirm.

Traceable shows the created labels in the tab and in the Inventory page in Catalog. For information on operations on labels in the Inventory page, see Additional Features.

Rules

You can create meaningful rules to automate label addition in Traceable. Based on the rules you define, Traceable evaluates the incoming data with the rule, and if it finds a match, it either creates new labels or uses existing ones.

Note

• A rule can create up to 100 labels automatically.

• Traceable evaluates the rules only when it receives successful response codes (between 2xx and 3xx) from APIs.

You can create rules in either of the following ways:

• From the Label Management page

• From the Explorer page

Create Rules from the Label Management page

Navigate to Settings → API Catalog → Label Management → Rules tab, and click + Create Rule. In the Create Label Rule pop-up window, complete the following steps. The example in the following steps, help create a rule to automatically label APIs that process credit card transactions to ensure compliance with PCI DSS.

1. Specify the rule Name, for example, PCI DSS compliant API label rule.

2. (Optional) Specify a description of the rule.

3. Specify the Rule Conditions:

   • The Attribute on which you wish to create the rule, for example, path.

   • The Operation you wish to apply to the attribute and value, for example, matches regex.

   • The Value corresponding to the attribute, for example, /.*creditcard.*/.

   Note

   Traceable applies an AND operation between rule conditions, which means that all conditions must be satisfied for the rule to apply.

4. Select one or more components where you wish to apply the rule, for example, API.

5. Select the method of label application:

   • Use existing Labels — Select from the list of existing labels or specify a name to create a new one, for example, PCI DSS compliance.

   • Generate from attribute value — Specify the attribute and optionally the regex to use some part of the attribute value instead of the complete attribute value to generate labels.

6. Click Confirm.

Traceable shows the configured rule in the Rules tab. In this tab, you can also do the following:

• Enable or disable a rule using the toggle corresponding to a rule.

• click on the Ellipse () icon corresponding to a rule to edit or delete it.

Create Rules from the Explorer page

You can create label rules after observing the traces or spans from the Explorer page in Analytics or the Traces tab in the Endpoint Details page. While creating this rule, Traceable also shows the list of attributes associated with a protocol. You can select the attributes from this list and Traceable applies the rule accordingly. For more information on creating these rules, see Traces.