With APIs and Software Libraries, How Much Code Is Needed to Create Something Immensely Useful? Not Much…

August 9, 2018 Kevin Farnham API Monitoring, API Science API, Integrations, JSON, Performance, Reporting, Teams

Your business likely requires customized views of the data that is core to the creation of your product. Decades ago, accomplishing this involved development of large data analysis software libraries that were customized to a company’s particular needs, along with user interfaces that enabled employees to view the data, so they could respond to anomalies.

Much has changed in recent decades. Data analysis code that had to be custom-developed decades ago is now available in software libraries such as Python’s NumPy and SciPy. Similarly, modern data display libraries available, for example, Matplotlib. This code is well tested and verified by a large user community. By utilizing these libraries, developers can simply call verified functions, rather than developing new custom code.

Meanwhile, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have immensely simplified the programming effort required to access large amounts of important data. In particular, JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) facilitates downloading data from APIs in a format that is easily ingested by most modern programming languages that are suited to data analysis, for example, Java and Python…

How to Create an Automated Custom Web Site that Displays API Performance Data

July 9, 2018August 9, 2018 Kevin Farnham API Monitoring, API Science API, Integrations, JSON, Performance, Teams

For your company to succeed, your API-based product must provide maximal performance and uptime to your customers. In order to provide this, you need to monitor the APIs (both internal and external) that are critical for your product’s customer experience. This series of posts illustrates how you can create a custom automated web site that […]

How to Use MatPlotLib to Display API Performance Data

June 13, 2018July 9, 2018 Kevin Farnham API Monitoring, API Science API, Integrations, JSON, Performance, Reporting, Teams

In my previous two posts, I illustrated how your team can Use cron and curl to Regularly Download API Performance Data and How to Use Python to Extract API Performance Data. In this post, I illustrate how you can use the Python MatPlotLib library to create plots of the downloaded data that will be of […]

How to Use Python to Extract JSON API Performance Data

June 6, 2018June 13, 2018 Kevin Farnham API Monitoring, API Science API, Integrations, JSON, Performance, Reporting

In my last post, I described How to Use cron and curl to Regularly Download API Performance Data. This is the first step toward creating a view of API performance data that is customized for your company’s needs. Once you have the raw data, you can use your company’s preferred programming languages and the custom […]

British Army Utilizes APIs for Increased Logistic Efficiency

April 17, 2018May 2, 2018 Kevin Farnham API Best Practices, Integrations, Reporting, Security

Large organizations that have existed for centuries have employed computer technology since its innovation. 50 years ago, large-scale organizations contracted developers to utilize 1960s software and hardware technology to create systems that advantageously advanced the accomplishment of their missions. In subsequent decades, this software was tuned for evolving situations. Along the way, errors identified in […]

APIs and Hotel/Motel Rooms: A Real-Life Business Case

March 19, 2018March 27, 2018 Kevin Farnham API Best Practices, API Monitoring, Integrations

In the modern economy, where people are connected via smart-phones, tablets, texting platforms, etc., a customer’s need to quickly find lodging for a suddenly desired trip or brief vacation is well known. Hotel and motel chains provide web sites that show customers what rooms are available at each location at any future time period. Meanwhile, […]

Tutorial: Creating Custom API Monitor Dashboards Using Javascript and JSON

January 15, 2018January 28, 2018 Kevin Farnham API Monitoring, API Science API, Integrations, JavaScript, JSON, Teams

API monitoring platforms like API Science provide the means for monitoring the APIs that are critical for your application. With the API Science platform, you can check APIs for uptime and performance each minute, define alerts that will be sent to your team based on the latest status of those APIs, review the performance history […]

Creating Custom Consoles Using API Monitor Data

December 18, 2017January 15, 2018 Kevin Farnham API Monitoring, API Science API, Integrations, JavaScript, Reporting

My last post illustrated how you can access API monitor data and display it on a web page. The demonstration software in that post calls the API Science API and displays the response text on a web page. The response from a call to the API Science API is a JSON formatted string, for example: […]

Using JQuery and AJAX to Display API Data on a Web Page

September 18, 2017December 18, 2017 Kevin Farnham API Monitoring, API Science API, Integrations, JavaScript

My last post demonstrated how JavaScript and JQuery can be used to make a API call and embed the response into a Document Object Model (DOM) instance. In this post, I show how to access the API response data and present it on the web page. This is the next step in illustrating how the API Science API can be utilized to develop custom consoles and other applications that address your particular needs.

Introduction: Javascript and Custom API Dashboards

August 22, 2017September 3, 2017 Kevin Farnham API Monitoring, API Science API, Integrations, JavaScript, Reporting

Javascript provides the capability for a company whose product is based on APIs to create custom dashboards that show their team the current status of the APIs that are critical for their product. If certain APIs are down, then their product is either down or partially down from the point of view of their customers. […]