Comparing Gloo Gateway and Kong Observability, Monitoring, and Supportability

In this blog series, we’ve explored important considerations for evaluating the right API gateway for your organization, covering aspects from developer experience to performance. For previous discussions, see part 1, part 2, and part 3. We examined these capabilities in both Gloo Gateway and Kong to understand how these solutions compare.

In the final post of our series, we explain how organizations gain powerful insights into their API operations through observability and monitoring, while supportability ensures smooth and successful performance.

Observability and Monitoring

Thorough analytics are an important feature of API gateway solutions – organizations use them to optimize performance and identify issues.

These are the API gateway observability and monitoring capabilities we compared:

• Logging captures and records detailed information about API requests and responses.
• Tracing tracks the flow of API requests through different services and components to provide a detailed view of request paths.
• Metrics and analytics collect, analyze, and visualize data on API usage, performance, and errors.

Overall, Gloo Gateway gets a 4/4 for these offerings, while Kong gets a 3/4. Read the full breakdown in the API Gateway buyers guide.

Supportability

Supportability ensures smooth operations and timely responses to meet user needs.

These are the API gateway supportability capabilities we compared:

• Product documentation provides detailed information on configuration, usage, features, and troubleshooting to assist developers and administrators in effectively utilizing their chosen solution.
• Enterprise support helps large organizations effectively manage, optimize, and troubleshoot their API gateway deployments.
• Community support provides a knowledge network for solving problems and collaborating on best practices.
• Long-term version support ensures that specific software versions are updated and have technical assistance for an extended period.
• Health checks regularly verify the availability and responsiveness of backend services to ensure optimal performance and detect issues promptly.

Overall, Gloo Gateway gets a 4/4 for these offerings, while Kong gets a 3/4. Read the full breakdown in the API Gateway buyers guide.

Compare Every API Gateway Capability

To learn more about all of the capabilities we compared for Gloo Gateway and Kong, download our API gateway buyer’s guide.

For a better understanding of API gateways, take our API Gateway Basics course.