Product Wrap 2023 - A busy year at FireTail

2023 has been a transformative year for the FireTail platform. Our engineering teams have delivered countless new features and capabilities that will help you to achieve true protection across all of your APIs. Here are some of the highlights…

Discovery

We repeatedly heard about the challenge of API inventory, and we built code-to-cloud discovery tools to address this challenge. Read more in our Integrations section below.

Integrations

This year we added a whole heap of integrations aimed at making it easier to find your APIs and to ensure that FireTail works seamlessly with other tools in your security stack:

Cloud Coverage: We added easy integrations and inventory scanning capabilities for Azure and GCP to our existing AWS offering. Scan these environments for API resources to populate them into FireTails SaaS platform, giving you full visibility of your APIs.

Repo Scanning: We developed the ability to scan Github repositories to help you find APIs in your code and match them to APIs in production.

Logging: Early in the year we introduced the AWS API Gateway Logging integration, empowering you to set up logging resources in an AWS account region. And Q4 saw us launch Application Load Balancer logging capabilities in AWS along with the Azure API Management Service logging integration. Logs are fed into the FireTail SaaS platform giving you a centralized record of all API events across your infrastructure. The addition of integrations from a diverse range of environments ensures you have a comprehensive view of your API activity. It’s important to note that we normalize the log formats to allow for universal analysis across log activity, no matter where the API is running.

KrakenD plugin : In Q2 we added an integration with KrakenD. Simply set up a FireTail KrakenD plugin which you can use to seamlessly create an integration with the FireTail SaaS platform using an API token. When the integration is set up, logs are sent to the FireTail SaaS platform where you can easily view your API activity. 

NGINX: The Firetail NGINX module validates API requests and responses against an OpenAPI specification. This not only provides protection from malicious requests reaching your API, but also provides a safeguard preventing your own API returning responses that don't comply with your OpenAPI specification. With a well defined OpenAPI specification, you can mitigate many common API security risks.

Notifications: Throughout the year we added new integrations with popular platforms, enabling you to receive alerts and notifications by the method of your choosing. Notifications are essential in maintaining your API security and FireTail empowers you to receive instant alerts whenever an API security event occurs. You define what triggers the alert based on your configuration and inventory data allowing you to react to potential threats and protect your critical systems and data. The notification integrations we added to the platform this year were:

• Lambda function
• Jira 
• PagerDuty
• ServiceNow
• Email notification 
• SMTP email notification

Specifications

In Q2, we added Specifications to the FireTail SaaS platform. Specifications can be used to group information for an API, allowing you to easily view the inventory data on the platform.  This addition is designed to transform the way you manage and view information for your APIs, bringing unprecedented clarity to your API inventory data.

Findings

One of the most powerful changes we made during the year was the addition of Findings as part of our posture management feature in the FireTail platform. Findings enables the detection of issues aligning with OWASP's top 10 API security issues and other API security best practices. Easily view the cause and severity of the issue and view the recommended remediation steps all within the FireTail platform.

Events 

Another major addition to our posture management feature was Events, which was added in Q3. Events work in tandem with Findings and are created when resources are added or changed. The FireTail platform displays any event that has occurred and details all the important information such as what the event is and when it happens. Crucially any findings associated with the event are displayed and you can simply click the event to view those findings. The important thing to note is that the Events system ensures ongoing evaluation of changes to the environment.

UI Changes

‍A new look and feel: The FireTail SaaS platform has undergone a complete redesign this past year. Many of the changes implemented were designed to create a platform that's easier to navigate and is more visually pleasing. 

The Dashboard, the hub of the platform, has been completely revamped. The layout and color scheme have all changed and a map indicating where your API requests have come from was added. This along with design changes to our graph, chart and log table among all the other features the dashboard has to offer gives you the complete overview of your API traffic and traffic trends over time. 

Navigation: Changes have been made throughout the platform making it easier for you to navigate and view information, such as adding pagination and having the option to select a grid or list view.

Resources: We have added a link in the platform to our extensive help documentation, you can access detailed instructions and videos to aid you, if needed, in setting up and using the FireTail SaaS platform. 

Download data: In Q4 we added the ability to download CSVs in the API, Findings and Events areas of the platform. Download only the data you want by selecting the columns included in the CSV. 

Filters: Continuous improvements have been made throughout the year to the filter function in the platform, for example, additional tags have been added, and pre-populated values can be selected from dropdown menus. These changes enable you to efficiently access the information you want when you want it. 

AWS Marketplace

Another exciting milestone was achieved in Q3, as FireTail was added to the AWS marketplace. The online software store helps Amazon customers find, buy, and immediately start using software and services that run on AWS. The AWS Marketplace is renowned for its rigorous selection process, ensuring that only top-quality solutions are listed. FireTail is proud to be among the chosen few to meet the stringent standards set by AWS Marketplace.

2023 has been a phenomenal year for the platform. Request a demo now to explore all of the improvements that we’ve made and learn how FireTail can deliver true protection across all of your APIs in 2024.