In my last post, I configured the World Bank BRIC API monitor such that if any of the individual calls to the World Bank Countries API takes more than 350 milliseconds to complete, that monitor step fails. The reason for doing this is to enable us to assess how frequently the World Bank Countries API […]
Continue readingMonth: June 2016
Timing-Out Slow-Performing External API Requests
API performance varies depending on many variables, including the response of the Internet (for example, resolve time and transfer time) and the timing for work that occurs on the remote server (connect time and processing time). My last post illustrated that calls to the World Bank Countries API sometimes exhibit abnormally slow performance. Unpredictable, though […]
Continue readingHow One Slow External API Can Bring Your Product Down
APIs receive a request from a user, gather data and/or perform some processing based on the request, then return the requested information (or other result) to the user. This sounds simple. But a lot can go wrong, and even when everything succeeds, the time it takes to complete the process can be highly variable. Greater […]
Continue readingCustomized API Monitoring Using Parameter Chains and Validation
In my last blog post, we created a monitor that requests the World Bank’s income levels data for nations that are classified as being “lower middle income.” This returns the data countries at this income level across the entire world. However, the World Bank’s API offers other parameters that can be easily be inserted into […]
Continue readingCustomized API Monitoring Using Parameters
Monitoring the performance and uptime of the internal and external APIs that your product depends on is critical if you are to maintain customer satisfaction. However, there is a difference between the performance and uptime of a generic call to an API, and a call that requests a specific subset of information. A request for […]
Continue readingAPI Performance as a Function of Call Location
Some weeks ago, I created API monitors that call the World Bank’s Countries API from four different locations: Ireland, Oregon (U.S. West Coast), Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. (U.S. East Coast). All four monitors request the World Bank information for Brazil. Here’s a recent view of my API Science Dashboard for these monitors: Each monitor is […]
Continue readingCreating a Multi-Step API Monitor
One of the unique features of the API Science platform is the capability to create multi-step API monitors, wherein multiple API calls are chained together into a single monitor. If your product requires multiple API calls in order to produce the result you deliver to your customer, you could create a collection of standard single-call […]
Continue readingWhat Do Curl Timings Mean?
API Science monitor checks gather statistics that provide a means for analyzing multiple aspects of API performance. For example, clicking on a monitor name from your API Dashboard brings up a summary screen that includes a bar plot detailing the performance for the last 10 API checks: Each bar consists of four sub-bars that are […]
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