If your company is selling web services that are accessed by through APIs, one of the most important factors in 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 your product has passed the test in all these areas, your potential customer’s development team will be brought in to assess your APIs from the point of view of performance and ease of integration into the customer’s planned service. Here is where poor API documentation could make the difference between…
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The 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 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 […]
Continue readingAnalyzing API Performance by Day of Week
My last post showed how the API Science API can be utilized to create a graphical analysis of API performance binned by hour of day. In this post, we use data extracted from the API Science API to analyze the performance of an API by day of week. This type of analysis would be useful […]
Continue readingAnalyzing API Performance Binned by Hour of Day
Performance data from the API Science API can be analyzed in many different ways. For example, a recent post presents A Graphical View of API Performance Based on Call Location. The analysis uses cURL statistics to compare the performance of monitors that call the World Bank Countries API from various locations around the globe over […]
Continue readingHow to Create an Automated Custom Web Site that Displays API Uptime Data
Previous posts described how to use curl, cron, JSON, Python, matplotlib, and HTML to create an automatically-updated custom API performance web page. In addition to providing API performance data, the API Science API also provides uptime data for the APIs you monitor. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to download API uptime data and create […]
Continue reading7 Ways to Customize API Monitoring Using Global and Local Variables
It is possible to configure API monitors with rigidly fixed parameters. However, using the API Science platform, it is also possible to configure API monitors using both account-wide global variables and monitor-specific local variables, in order to provide your team with a deeper view into what your customers are experiencing. Introduction to API Science’s Global […]
Continue readingWith APIs and Software Libraries, How Much Code Is Needed to Create Something Immensely Useful? Not Much…
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. […]
Continue readingHow to Create an Automated Custom Web Site that Displays API Performance Data
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 […]
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