[Apiman-user] apiman suitable for managing end users?

[Eric Wittmann]

Hi Tim.

Interesting scenario.  The typical scenario is that the apiman UI is 
only used by service providers and application developers.  End users 
will typically not use the apiman UI.  However, that doesn't mean apiman 
can't track end users.  If authentication is enabled (either BASIC or 
OAuth2), then rate limiting can be configured on a per-user basis.  When 
you configure the rate limit policy, you can choose "user" as an option 
and then provide the HTTP header containing the user.  When configuring 
the authentication policy (which must come first in the policy chain) 
you would need to enable forwarding of the username.

In addition, the next version of apiman will also include the 
authenticated user in the metrics data.  This would allow you to query 
the elasticsearch metrics information by username.  We won't have any 
specific support in the UI for breaking down metrics by user, at least 
not right away, but it will be in the data at least.

Of course, you *can* use apiman the way you are suggesting.  But as you 
observed there are some challenges.  We don't currently have a way to 
assign roles to users automatically when they register.  It would need 
to be a feature request I think:

https://issues.jboss.org/browse/APIMAN

I think if we added a very generic "user registration" extension point 
to apiman, then you could write your own custom handler to do whatever 
you want.  Such a handler would be invoked the first time a new user 
logged into apiman.  You could drive off their email address, roles, 
whatever.  You could also provide a handler via a plugin.

Thoughts?  :)

-Eric


On 7/19/2015 7:45 AM, Tim Dudgeon wrote:
> Hi
>
> I've been looking into apiman and like what I see, but have a conceptual
> question about its usage.
> I need something to manage the end users of my applications, not just
> the people who are developing and managing those applications. Is apiman
> suitable for this? e.g. each actual user of the applications would
> register to apiman and use their own access keys. I need this as I will
> want to handle metrics and usage on the level of the individual user.
>
> Also, if this was to be a sensible approach how does one configure the
> registration process. I understand apiman is using keycloak for this,
> but I see no link in the UI to configure keycloak. And I would need a
> way that new users could automatically be assigned to an organisation
> (e.g. a default organisation, or a specific one based on their email
> address).
>
> Tim
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