Scenario 5 - Request throttling problems and HTTP 403 - Forbidden issues

Referring to my blog on Azure API Management Troubleshooting Series, this is the fifth scenario of the lab. Please make sure you have followed the lab setup instructions as per this, to recreate the problem.

The ‘Resources’ API fetches user’s personal details, social media posts, comments and photos and utilizes the response returned for a machine learning project. Strangely after few days of using it ‘GetPosts’ operation started throwing HTTP 403 – Forbidden error whereas the other operations are working fine as expected.

{
"statusCode": 403,"message": "Forbidden"

}

Apart from the above, we are also encountering HTTP 429 - Too many requests error while invoking ‘GetComments’ operation for every 2^nd request. The issue automatically gets resolve after 10 secs, however it reoccurs once the first call to API is made again. The behavior is not observed for the other operations.

{
"statusCode": 429,"message": "Rate limit is exceeded. Try again in 5 seconds."

}

• HTTP 403 – Forbidden error can be thrown when there is any access restriction policy implemented.
• Check the APIM inspector trace and you should notice the existence of a ‘ip-filter’ policy which filters (allows/denies) calls from specific IP addresses and/or address ranges.
• To check the scope of the ‘ip-filter’ policy click on the ‘Calculate effective policy’ button. If you don’t see any access restriction policy implemented at any scopes, next validation step should be done at product level, by navigating to the associated product and then click on Policies option.

<inbound>

<base />

<choose>

<when condition="@(context.Operation.Name.Equals("GetPosts"))">

<ip-filter action="forbid">

<address-range from="0.0.0.0" to="255.255.255.255" />

</ip-filter>

</when>

</choose>

</inbound>

• For the second issue (HTTP 429 - Too many requests) we will follow the same procedure by checking the APIM inspector trace and check if there is any ‘rate-limit’ or ‘rate-limit-by-key’ policy implemented at any scope.
• If you calculate the effective policy, you should notice an access restriction policy (rate-limit-by-key) implemented at Global scope, i.e under ‘Inbound processing’ in ‘All APIs’ option.

<inbound>

<choose>

<when condition="@(context.Operation.Name.Equals("GetComments"))">

<rate-limit-by-key calls="1" renewal-period="10" increment-condition="@(context.Response.StatusCode == 200)" counter-key="@(context.Request.IpAddress)" />

</when>

</choose>

</inbound>

Read more about ip-filter and rate-limit-by-key policies in APIM.

Happy Learning !