Graph Manager overview

Apollo Graph Manager (formerly Apollo Engine) is a cloud service that helps you manage, validate, and secure your organization's data graph.

Feature summary

Graph Manager provides the following features to all Apollo users for free:

• A GraphQL schema registry that tracks changes and enables you to create variants of your schema for different environments (such as staging and production)
• A schema explorer that makes it easy to inspect your schema's queries, mutations, and other object definitions
• Metrics reporting for up to the last 24 hours
• Team collaboration via organizations
• Slack notifications for schema changes and daily metrics reports
• Management of a federated data graph

Additional features are available to organizations with a subscription to an Apollo Team or Enterprise plan:

• Metrics reporting for arbitrary timeframes
• Metrics segmentation by distinct clients and versions
• Schema change validation
• Operation safelisting
• Resolver-level query tracing
• Integration with Datadog
• Longer data retention

Learn more about pricing and billing

Managing graphs

A graph in Graph Manager represents the entirety of a connected data graph. Every graph has its own associated GraphQL schema.

Creating a graph

To create a graph in the Graph Manager interface, first select the Graph Manager organization that the graph will belong to. Then click New Graph in the upper right and proceed through the creation flow.

Note that every graph in Graph Manager has a globally unique graph name. We recommend that you prefix your graph names with the name of your company or organization to avoid naming collisions.

Viewing graph information

After selecting an organization in Graph Manager, click on a particular graph to view its data and settings. All of a Graph Manager organization's members have access to the data and settings for every graph that belongs to that organization.

Transferring graph ownership

You can transfer a graph to a different Graph Manager organization you belong to by visiting the graph's Settings page and changing the graph owner.

Deleting a graph

Deleting a graph cannot be undone!

You can delete a graph from Graph Manager by visiting its Settings page and clicking Delete.

Distinguishing between application environments

Every graph in Graph Manager should correspond to a single application. However, a single application might run in multiple environments (such as test, staging, and production).

To distinguish between graph activity for different application environments, you can define variants for a graph. Each variant has its own schema that can (but doesn't have to) differ from the default variant.

When your server sends metrics to Graph Manager, it can associate an operation with a particular variant. Variants appear as separate items in your organization's graph list, allowing you to view analytics for each application environment in isolation.

Ingesting and fetching data

Graph Manager ingests and stores performance metrics data sent from your GraphQL server. Use one of the following methods to send data to Graph Manager:

• Use Apollo Server as your application's GraphQL server and include a Graph Manager API key in your server configuration.

• If you aren't using Apollo Server, you can send trace metrics to the Graph Manager reporting endpoint (again, providing an API key with every request).

API keys

Any system that communicates with Graph Manager (whether to send metrics or fetch them) must use an API key to do so. You can add and remove API keys from your graph from its Settings page in the Graph Manager UI.

You should use a different API key for each system that communicates with Graph Manager. This provides you with more granular control over how Graph Manager data is sent and accessed.