It was major news when Slack experienced a global outage on January 4, 2021, the first work day of the new year. The Associated Press article Slack kicks off 2021 with a global outage reported: “It’s the latest tech glitch to show how disruptive technical difficulties can be when millions of people are depending on just a few services to work and go to school from home during the pandemic.” The phrase “during the pandemic” implies there will be a time “after the pandemic” when the world returns to its pre-pandemic state. However, the reality is that in many ways the impact of events that occurred in 2020 for technology professionals is permanent…
Continue readingAlert Rules
Five Ways to Help Your Developers Analyze API Outages
When your product relies on APIs (external or internal), it is critical that you monitor those APIs in order to know when something goes awry that affects your customer’s perception of your product’s current status. There are many ways an API can be down and or adversely affect your product. An external API may simply […]
Continue readingHow to Use Your API Science One-Month Free Trial (Part 3)
When you’ve created and configured your first API Science monitor, you’ll want to configure automated notifications to your team when something involving a critical external or internal API goes awry. You’ll also want to study the performance of your critical APIs using API Science reports. Configuring API Monitor Notifications While your customers access your product […]
Continue readingUsing Slack, Zapier, HipChat, PagerDuty, IFTTT, and Todoist to Broadcast API Monitor Alerts
Today, many companies have employees that work from diverse locations around the globe. If your company’s product relies on APIs (internal and/or external), your team needs to know immediately when a critical API goes down or starts delivering invalid information. But how can you quickly communicate problems of this type to your global team? The […]
Continue readingValidating API Responses and Performance Using JavaScript
Determining the present state of an API that’s critical to your product’s performance is the reason why companies apply API monitoring on a 24/7 basis. If your product depends on a sequence of calls to multiple APIs (perhaps internal as well as external), your product could appear “down” to your customers if even one of […]
Continue readingUsing IFTTT (IF This Then That) to Extend API Alert Messaging
IFTTT (IF This Then That) is a site that enables the creation of API “Recipes for the Small Business Owner.” Activity that takes place on a particular site is monitored by IFTTT, and if a trigger event occurs, then an action can be initiated that produces a result on a different site. The IFTTT “recipes” […]
Continue readingIntegrating API Monitoring with PagerDuty
PagerDuty is a widely-used online incident management platform that “helps orchestrate the ideal response to create better customer, employee, and business value.” When something goes wrong, that incident can be logged in PagerDuty, and all team members who are responsible for monitoring that system will be notified about the issue. If your business relies on […]
Continue readingAPI Monitoring with HipChat
HipChat is a chat platform designed for teams. Users create “rooms” where team members can present material and interact. The benefit is that the entire team can easily view the history of the discussion, or search for individual posts, at a single location. Compare this with a team attempting to search old emails to reconstruct […]
Continue readingAPI Monitoring with Slack, Zapier, and Facebook
My previous post described how to integrate the Slack messaging app into your API Science monitoring work flow. I created a Slack channel to receive API Science alerts, added the channel to my API Science Contact Book, and configured my “br Tokyo” monitor to send an alert to the Slack channel whenever an API check […]
Continue readingSlack Integration for API Monitoring
Slack is a widely-used messaging app that facilitates team collaboration regardless of where the team members are located. If your team is monitoring critical APIs, team members will need to be alerted when one or more of the APIs goes down or experiences performance issues. One way to do this is to integrate your Slack […]
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