The headlines are everywhere. Here are some recent ones from the Wall Street Journal: “Companies and Cities Adjust to a Remote Work Force” (8 June 2020). “San Francisco’s Office Market Cools as Startups Retrench” (early June 2020). “Once Booming, San Francisco Apartment Market Reverses” (19 June 2020). “Another Exodus Ahead for U.S. Cities?” (20 June 2020). “Covid-19 Derails Retirement Dreams” (11 June 2020). What does this mean for a creative technology entrepreneur who has a great idea, but has not yet implemented it?
Continue readingAPI Monitoring
Why Does Tail Latency Matter?
It’s a complicated question, actually: latency versus throughput. Throughput is how many responses you can give to your varied customers in a certain amount of time. Latency is the amount of time it took for an individual customer to receive the response to their request. If your product is going to succeed, obviously you need […]
Continue readingFive 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 readingUsing Javascript to Extract Information from SOAP API Responses
My last post described how to create a monitor that calls Flickr’s Interestingness SOAP API to retrieve a list of recently uploaded photos that Flickr users have found interesting. Once the list of interesting photos is retrieved, we might want to call other Flickr API endpoints to retrieve more detailed information about the individual photos. […]
Continue readingMonitoring Flickr’s Interestingness SOAP API
The API Science platform provides capability for monitoring APIs that utilize SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) interfaces. The photo sharing site Flickr offers a substantive API that can be accessed using multiple protocols, including SOAP. In this article series I’ll use the Flickr API to illustrate techniques that can be applied for monitoring the status and performance of SOAP-based APIs. Flickr invented a metric they call interestingness, which ranks posted photos based on statistics including clickthroughs, comments, favorites, tags…
Continue readingThe Business Case for Excellent API Documentation
If your company is selling web services that are accessed by through APIs, one of the most important factors for your ability to attract paying customers is your API documentation. Management teams from potential customers will be interested in what information your APIs provide, their capacity and reliability, and how quickly they can scale. Once […]
Continue readingThe Effect of Global Location on CURL Call Metric Patterns
My previous post used CURL component metrics to illustrate performance in calling the World Bank Countries API (located in Washington, D.C.) from Oregon. The curl resolve, connect, processing, and transfer times for calls from Oregon over a period of one week were plotted and analyzed. Here is the plotted Oregon data: The conclusion from studying […]
Continue readingUsing CURL Component Data to Illustrate API Call Performance Patterns
My last post analyzed performance component results produced by the curl Internet data transfer utility in an effort to understand what typically causes slow API call performance. Four instances of unusually slow but successful calls to the World Bank Countries API were studied. In three instances (calls from Oregon, Ireland, and Japan), curl’s Processing Time […]
Continue readingAnalyzing the Causes of Slow API Call Performance
In recent posts I’ve been analyzing the data for a week of API monitoring from four different locations around the globe (Washington, DC, Oregon, Ireland, and Japan). The hourly performance for calls over the week looks like this: Since the World Bank Countries API that’s being called is located in Washington, DC, it’s not surprising […]
Continue readingAnalyzing API Performance Hour-of-Day Statistics
A recent post analyzed API performance by hour of day over a one-week period. The average performance of calls to the API was fairly consistent, except for calls made in the last hour of the day (the hour before Midnight Universal Time). This plot presents the analysis results: The question is: why was average performance […]
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