What is application key used for in API management

[phoenixming0912]

Hi all,

I am a beginner to API managment. I hava already built a proxy to my API and can be consumed.

I am wondering why it is also needed to create an application for the proxy.

One more thing is, if I have mutiple consumers(needs to know the identity), do I need to create multiple application for one API proxy?

[drvup · Accepted solution]

Hi eric.yu5 ,

a Application on API Management is at the end a consumer (-application). These consumers need to authentify against your proxies. That's where the application key (client ID) takes place. So you do not need to create an application, if you do not wanna use this way of authentification within APIM.

If you have multiple consumers, you will use multiple applications for one proxy to identify, who is calling you. Otherwise you need to do it with other ways (adding a specific header field?)

Regards,

Cedric