How to Catalog Azure APIs the Right Way with DigitalAPI’s developer portal?

Azure gives you a strong foundation for designing, securing, and managing APIs, but most enterprises quickly realise that APIM alone isn’t enough to run a modern, scalable API program. As your organization grows across clouds, business units, and integration patterns, the real challenge becomes visibility, knowing what APIs exist, where they live, who owns them, and whether they’re kept in sync.

Native Azure tooling works well within its boundaries, but it doesn’t unify APIs scattered across Functions, Logic Apps, Kubernetes, other clouds, or third-party gateways. That’s where a dedicated, multi-gateway API catalog becomes essential to prevent drift, duplication, and silos. In this blog, we will see how you can catalog your APIs from Azure and other gateways using DigitalAPI developer portal.

Why native Azure capabilities only take you so far?

Azure offers a powerful stack for APIs, design, publishing, managing, and security. For example, the Azure architecture best-practices guidance emphasises aspects like reliability, security, scalability, and governance in APIM. But when it comes to cataloguing your entire API estate in one place, you’ll quickly hit major roadblocks. Here’s a breakdown of the most common limitations you’ll encounter in an Azure API ecosystem:

1. Limited source-visibility: While APIM supports APIs hosted in Azure, many organizations also deploy APIs on other clouds, on-premises, serverless functions, or even via third-party gateways. If your catalog only “sees” Azure APIM, you’ll miss shadow APIs or partner endpoints.
2. Manual upkeep and metadata drift: It’s one thing to publish an API in APIM; it’s another to ensure that documentation, owner tags, domains, lifecycle states, SLAs, and versions are all kept in sync and searchable. Without automation, you’ll end up with stale entries and duplication.
3. Specs vs runtime drift: Your development teams may deliver OpenAPI specs, function apps, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, etc. But the runtime versions deployed may differ. Without a mechanism to reconcile spec runtime, your catalog becomes unreliable.
4. Silos across tools: Many teams still design APIs in GitHub, Postman, SwaggerHub, store APIs in Azure Functions, and expose them via Service Fabric or Kubernetes. The catalog must consolidate all these sources, not just Azure APIM.
5. Governance and product-level metadata are weak: Even if you list all APIs, you still need richer context: which business domain, which product, which partner/market facing, what SLA, what monetisation tier. A bare list doesn’t cut it.
6. Search/discovery and experience fall short: Developers expect to be able to search by business domain, tags, version, owner, and usage metrics. A basic portal listing won’t deliver the developer experience needed for scale.

What does a modern Azure API catalog must deliver?

Before we jump into step-by-step, let’s define what “good” looks like in a catalog. Based on our prior writing (see our “What is an API catalog?” piece) and enterprise practice, a modern catalog should deliver:

• Centralized visibility across your entire API estate — internal, external, partner, across environments, and gateways.
• Searchable, filterable catalogue — by name, business domain, owner, lifecycle state, version, tag, rating/usage.
• Rich metadata and documentation — version history, request/response examples, auth methods, SLA, owner contacts, tags, domains.
• Automated import and sync — integrate with source repos, gateway APIs, and CI/CD pipelines to avoid manual upload and drift.
• Governance and lifecycle controls — owners, review states, retirement states, approval workflows.
• Metrics & insights — usage, performance, adoption, which APIs are under-utilised, which are candidates for retirement or monetisation.
• Developer experience — a portal where internal or external developers can discover, self-onboard, test in a sandbox, browse docs, and consume APIs like products.

How to catalog Azure APIs in your unified portal?

Here’s how you can implement a high-performing Azure-centric API catalog, using DigitalAPI.ai as the example platform.

1. Define your gateway/environment connection

From your DigitalAPI dashboard, navigate to API Environments (or “Gateway Connections”) and select Azure as your gateway type. This tells the portal where to pull from and how to authenticate.

2. Configure the Azure connection

Provide the required credentials: service-principal or managed identity to access APIM, subscription ID, resource group, and region. You may also choose default visibility (internal vs external), default tags, and default domains.

3. Import your APIs from Azure APIM

Once connected, click Import API (or equivalent) to pull in all APIs registered in your APIM instance(s). The portal should fetch: API name, version(s), spec (OpenAPI), owner metadata, tags, lifecycle status, and published date.

4. Enrich & unify your API estate

Once Azure APIs are imported, your portal becomes the unified catalog. Because your portal is not limited to Azure, you can also import APIs from non-Azure sources (GitHub specs, Postman collections, other gateways) and present a unified view. This reflects the multi-gateway reality many organisations face.

5. Enable self-service discovery for developers

In the catalog view (sometimes called “API Estate” or “Developer Portal”), developers should be able to:

• Search by keyword, filter by domain, tag, owner, lifecycle state
• View API details: Description, version list, examples, sandbox link, documentation
• Request access / subscribe to APIs (for partner/external APIs)
• View status: is the API active, deprecated, or being sunset

Why DigitalAPI is the right platform for your Azure API catalog?

At DigitalAPI, we’ve built our unified portal with these challenges in mind, recognising what enterprises struggle with when their API estate spans multiple gateways, environments, and sources.

• Easy connector for Azure API Management: Import APIM instances in minutes, pull metadata and specs automatically.
• Unified API estate: APIs from Azure, AWS, on-premises, and serverless are all visible in one searchable interface.
• Rich metadata model: Domains, tags, lifecycle states, monetisation tiers, owners, SLA, usage.
• Developer-friendly portal: Search, filter, view docs, request access, and onboard quickly.
• Governance & insights: Audit trail, usage metrics, shadow API identification, retirement workflows.
• Automation and CI/CD-friendly: Keep the catalog fresh without manual drag-and-drop.

FAQ

1. Can this work if I don’t use Azure API Management exclusively?

Yes. One of the key advantages of a unified catalog is that you can import APIs from APIM and from other environments (on-premises, AWS, Kubernetes, serverless, etc.). That means internal, external, and partner APIs all show up in one place.

2. How automatic is the cataloging process?

Once the gateway connection is configured and scheduled, the portal can discover new APIs, pull in their specs, version information, and metadata automatically, eliminating a lot of manual work and reducing drift.

3. What if some APIs don’t live in APIM but are still “Azure-centric” (e.g., Azure Functions, Logic Apps)?

That’s fine. The portal still allows importing specs from other sources (GitHub, OpenAPI files, Postman collections, etc.). You can link those APIs, treat them as first-class citizens, and ensure they are discoverable alongside the “official” APIM ones.

4. What’s the benefit to developers, not just architects/platform teams?

From a developer’s perspective, discovery becomes fast and intuitive: no more digging through spreadsheets, Slack conversations, or wikis to find the API you need. From the platform side, you gain governance, reuse, rationalisation, and the ability to evolve your API product catalogue.