Towards Data-Driven Real-Time Performance Monitoring of Platform Ecosystems

Paper i proceeding, 2025

Platform ecosystems have revolutionized value creation across numerous industries, inducing technical leaps and scaling artifact generation in scales and speeds unattainable through traditional vertically integrated or single-firm models. These ecosystems rely on collaborative interactions among actors to co-create and reuse value. Such ecosystems are socio-technical environments which require complex governance and orchestration strategies to ensure ecosystem health and performance from financial, technical, and social perspectives. Consequently, monitoring the performance of platform ecosystems requires non-primitive metrics as factors contributing to ecosystem performance are multifaceted compared to conventional software settings. Effective orchestration of platform ecosystems requires relies on access to real-time quantitative performance indicators. The existing literature offers various quantitative health metrics and performance indicators for platform ecosystems, yet these are dispersed across multiple studies and often embedded in abstract models or found within generic analytics systems. This research reviews existing quantitative real-time health metrics and performance indicators of platform ecosystems. We identified 417 distinct metrics after eliminating duplicates and incomplete definitions, and refined 168 of these metrics to be calculable in real-time using a consistent framework for definition, nomenclature, and quantification. Furthermore, we compiled existing real-time ecosystem health monitoring methods into a reference architecture and tested its feasibility in two active platform ecosystems. The study yields four key contributions: a practical catalog of platform ecosystem health metrics; a reference architecture for creating real-time ecosystem health monitoring solutions, demonstrated through implementation in two operational platform ecosystems; industry-relevant insights for practitioners; and a discussion of potential future research directions.