#2 Leverage the api.data.gov API Management Tool

Features

API Keys

We’ll handle API keys for you:

API key signup: It’s quick and easy for users to signup for an API key and start using it immediately.
Shared across services: Users can reuse their API key across all participating api.data.gov APIs.
No coding required: No code changes are required to your API. If your API is being hit through api.data.gov, you can simply assume it’s from a valid user.

Analytics

We’ll track all the traffic to your API and give you tools to easily analyze it:

Demonstrate value: Understand how your API is being used so you can gauge the value and success of your APIs.
Visualize usage and trends: View graphs of the overall usage trends for your APIs.
Flexible querying: Drill down into the stats based on any criteria. Find out how much traffic individual users are generating, or answer more complex questions about aggregate usage.
Monitor API performance: We gather metrics on the speed of your API, so you can keep an eye on how your API is performing.
No coding required: No code changes are required to your API. If your API is being hit through api.data.gov, we can take care of logging the necessary details.

Documentation

We can help with publishing documentation for your API:

Hosted or linked: We can host the documentation of your API, or, if you already have your own developer portal, we can simply link to it.
One stop shop: As more agencies add APIs to api.data.gov, users will be able to discover and explore more government APIs all at one destination.

Rate Limiting

You might not want to allow all users to have uncontrolled access to your APIs:

Prevent abuse: Your API servers won’t see traffic from users exceeding their limits, preventing additional load on your servers.
Per user limits: Individual users can be given higher or lower rate limits.
No coding required: No code changes are required to your API. If your API is being hit, you can simply assume it’s from a user that hasn’t exceeded their rate limits.

api.data.gov is a free API management service for federal agencies: http://api.data.gov/about/

US EPA