What is APIForge?
APIForge is a behavioral intelligence and observability platform specialized for backend APIs.
Unlike generic monitoring tools that display raw metrics, APIForge understands how your APIs behave over time: detecting performance drifts, correlating releases with incidents, and surfacing actionable insights automatically.
The problem it solves
Most observability tools show you what is happening — a latency spike, an error rate. APIForge tells you why and since when.
| Problem | APIForge answer |
|---|---|
| "Did this deploy break something?" | Before/after release comparison, automatic |
| "Why is this endpoint slow?" | P50/P90/P99 per route, drift detection over 7–30 days |
| "Which endpoints can I safely remove?" | Dead endpoint detection (no traffic in N days) |
| "Is my API healthy right now?" | Health Score 0–100, computed continuously |
Three core principles
Privacy-first
Not a policy — an architecture constraint. The SDK is built so it is technically impossible to collect sensitive data, even if you wanted to.
What is captured: route pattern, HTTP method, status code, latency, response size (bytes), timestamp.
What is never captured: request body, response body, headers, cookies, tokens, IP addresses, query parameter values, any user-identifying data.
Local-first by default
APIForge works completely offline out of the box. No account required, no cloud configuration, no database to set up. All data is stored in a single SQLite file on your server.
The dashboard, the insights engine, the Health Score — everything runs in the same process as your application.
Cloud mode — optional
For production environments or multi-service setups, cloud mode sends metrics to the APIForge SaaS. Add cloudUrl and apiKey to your middleware config — nothing else changes.
Developer-first
Installation time under 5 minutes. No mandatory parameters. The dashboard auto-starts on port 4242. Insights surface automatically.
What APIForge is not
- Not a logging tool — it does not record logs, errors, or stack traces.
- Not a general APM — it does not instrument your database queries or internal function calls.
- Not a clone of Datadog or Grafana — it does not monitor infrastructure.
Next steps
- Quick Start — install and see your first metrics in under 5 minutes
- Configuration — all available options
- Automatic Insights — what APIForge detects and how