Most development teams struggle to keep track of their APIs. Cloudflare API Discovery helps you map out and understand your API attack surface — the full set of endpoints that could be targeted by attackers.
Cloudflare produces a map of API endpoints by grouping similar request paths together (path normalization).
For example, you might have thousands of APIs, but a lot of the calls look similar, such as:
api.example.com/profile/238api.example.com/profile/392
Both paths serve a similar purpose — retrieving user profiles — but they are not identical. To simplify your endpoints, these examples might both map to api.example.com/profile/*.
API Discovery runs this process across all your traffic, generating a simple map of endpoints that might look like:
/api/login/{customer_identifier}
/api/auth
/api/account/{customer_identifier}
/api/password_reset
/api/logoutSimilarly, if you have multiple subdomains that share the same set of endpoints, Cloudflare consolidates subdomains:
us-api.example.com/api/v1/users/{var1}
de-api.example.com/api/v1/users/{var1}