Ever since the Internet was created, the problem of connecting available services with consumers who need those services has been ubiquitous. Developers knew that “surely someone must have solved this problem, but where do I find their solution?” An important development was the invention of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). APIs enable an outside application to utilize the […]
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Diving into OpenAPI 3.1
In the past decade API’s have proliferated. Companies sought increased efficiency through automated business-to-business transaction processing using APIs; web-based companies created APIs to enable developers to integrate their data products into new processes; and new companies were created that pulled data from multiple external APIs and fused it into their own processing to produce unique web products that offered potential audiences a view of meshed data that wasn’t available elsewhere. The pandemic accelerated this trend, as people working from home were no longer able to easily and securely connect to the corporate intranet to accomplish their tasks. As the number of available APIs mushroomed, problems arose…
Continue readingSlack Proves that the Impact of COVID on Technology Professionals Is Permanent
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 […]
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 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 […]
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