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.
Note
When classifying APIs as external or internal and authenticated or unauthenticated, the labels you apply take precedence over Traceable's identification based on IP addresses or traffic. This ensures user-defined classifications are prioritized for accurate API categorization.
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 create these labels from 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 label rules and, using examples, how you can use them to monitor data.
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.
When classifying APIs as external or internal and authenticated or unauthenticated, the labels created using rules take precedence over Traceable's identification based on IP addresses or traffic. This is applicable for all APIs discovered post-rule creation.
You can create rules in either of the following ways:
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 helps create a rule to automatically label APIs that process credit card transactions to ensure compliance with PCI DSS.
Label Rule
Specify the rule Name, for example, PCI DSS compliant API label rule.
(Optional) Specify a description of the rule.
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.
Select one or more components where you wish to apply the rule, for example, API.
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.
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 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 Explorer.
Create Rule from the Explorer page