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Troubleshooting client response timeouts and errors with API Management

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APPLIES TO: All API Management tiers

This article helps you troubleshoot intermittent connection errors and related latency issues in Azure API Management. Specifically, this article will provide information and troubleshooting for the exhaustion of source address network translation (SNAT) ports. If you require more help, contact the Azure experts at Azure Community Support or file a support request with Azure Support.

Symptoms

Client applications calling APIs through your API Management (APIM) service may exhibit one or more of the following symptoms:

  • Intermittent HTTP 500 errors
  • Timeout error messages

These symptoms manifest as instances of BackendConnectionFailure in your Azure Monitor resource logs.

Cause

This pattern of symptoms often occurs due to network address translation (SNAT) port limits with your APIM service.

Whenever a client calls one of your APIM APIs, Azure API Management service opens a SNAT port to access your backend API. As discussed in Outbound connections in Azure, Azure uses source network address translation (SNAT) and a Load Balancer (not exposed to customers) to communicate with end points outside Azure in the public IP address space, as well as end points internal to Azure that aren't using Virtual Network service endpoints. This situation is only applicable to backend APIs exposed on public IPs.

Each instance of API Management service is initially given a pre-allocated number of SNAT ports. That limit affects opening connections to the same host and port combination. SNAT ports are used up when you have repeated calls to the same address and port combination. Once a SNAT port has been released, the port is available for reuse as needed. The Azure Network load balancer reclaims SNAT ports from closed connections only after waiting four minutes.

A rapid succession of client requests to your APIs may exhaust the pre-allocated quota of SNAT ports if these ports are not closed and recycled fast enough, preventing your APIM service from processing client requests in a timely manner.

Mitigations and solutions

Addressing the problem of SNAT port exhaustion first requires diagnosing and optimizing the performance of your backend services.

General strategies for mitigating SNAT port exhaustion are discussed in Troubleshooting outbound connections failures from Azure Load Balancer documentation. Of these strategies, the following are applicable to API Management.

Scale your APIM instance

Each API Management instance is allocated a number of SNAT ports, based on APIM units. You can allocate additional SNAT ports by scaling your API Management instance with additional units. For more info, see Scale your API Management service.

Note

SNAT port usage is currently not available as a metric for autoscaling API Management units.

Use multiple IPs for your backend URLs

Each connection from your APIM instance to the same destination IP and destination port of your backend service will use a SNAT port, in order to maintain a distinct traffic flow. Without different SNAT ports for the return traffic from your background service, APIM would have no way to separate one response from another.

Because SNAT ports can be reused if the destination IP or destination port are different, another way to avoid SNAT port exhaustion is by using multiple IPs for your backend service URLs.

For more, see Outbound proxy Azure Load Balancer.

Place your APIM and backend service in the same VNet

If your backend API is hosted on an Azure service that supports service endpoints such as App Service, you can avoid SNAT port exhaustion issues by placing your APIM instance and backend service in the same virtual network and exposing it through service endpoints or private endpoints. When you use a common VNet and place service endpoints on the integration subnet, outbound traffic from your APIM instance to those services bypasses the internet, thus avoiding SNAT port restrictions. Likewise, if you use a VNet and private endpoints, you will not have any outbound SNAT port issues to that destination.

For details, see How to use Azure API Management with virtual networks and Integrate App Service with an Azure virtual network.

Place your APIM in a virtual network and route outbound calls to Azure Firewall

Similar to placing your APIM and backend services in a virtual network, you can employ Azure Firewall in a VNet with your APIM service, then route outbound APIM calls to Azure Firewall. Between APIM and Azure Firewall (being in the same VNet), no SNAT ports are required. For SNAT connections to your backend services, Azure Firewall has 64,000 available ports, a much higher amount than is allocated to APIM instances.

Refer to Azure Firewall documentation for more.

Consider response caching and other backend performance tuning

Another potential mitigation to consider is improving processing times for your backend APIs. One way to do this is by configuring certain APIs with response caching to reduce latency between client applications calling your API and your APIM backend load.

For more, see Add caching to improve performance in Azure API Management.

Consider implementing access restriction policies

If it makes sense for your business scenario, you can implement access restriction policies for your API Management product. For example, the rate-limit-by-key policy can be used to prevent API usage spikes on a per key basis by limiting the call rate per a specified time period.

See Rate limiting and quota policies for more info.

See also