In mid-May, a massive global cyber attack was executed that affected major companies in more than 150 countries. Major victims of the attack included Britain’s National Health Service, “causing widespread disruptions and interrupting medical procedures across hospitals in England and Scotland.” Other major victims included Spain’s Telefonica, Deutsche Bahn (Germany’s national railway service), French carmaker […]
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Integrating API Monitoring into Your Product’s Operational Workflow
You’ve got a product that requires many nines of uptime. If an API (external or internal) that your product requires is down, your own product is down, or key aspects of it are down. You are monitoring the APIs that are key for your product, and have alerts configured so that your development and QA […]
Continue readingModifying Groups of API Monitors Using Tags
In recent posts, I’ve described how you can use API Science’s API to evaluate API monitor checks, detect failed checks, and use tags to group API monitors. If you’ve integrated the monitoring of your product’s performance and availability using the API Science API, it’s also possible to take the next step of modifying your monitors […]
Continue readingUsing Tags to Group API Monitors
Many online products require gathering information from many different data sources. If your product queries multiple APIs (external or internal), then it is vital for your team to monitor those APIs in order to assess whether your product appears up, partially up, or down. My last two posts described how you can use the API […]
Continue readingUsing the Weekly API Science Report to Improve Customer Experience
Your API Science account automatically provides you with the “Weekly API Science Report” which is delivered by email to the email address associated with your account. Here’s an sample email for an account that runs two API Science monitors: The report proceeds from a performance overview for all of your monitors down to the details […]
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 readingAssessing the Results of Monitor Timeout Validations
In my last post, I configured the World Bank BRIC API monitor such that if any of the individual calls to the World Bank Countries API takes more than 350 milliseconds to complete, that monitor step fails. The reason for doing this is to enable us to assess how frequently the World Bank Countries API […]
Continue readingTiming-Out Slow-Performing External API Requests
API performance varies depending on many variables, including the response of the Internet (for example, resolve time and transfer time) and the timing for work that occurs on the remote server (connect time and processing time). My last post illustrated that calls to the World Bank Countries API sometimes exhibit abnormally slow performance. Unpredictable, though […]
Continue readingHow One Slow External API Can Bring Your Product Down
APIs receive a request from a user, gather data and/or perform some processing based on the request, then return the requested information (or other result) to the user. This sounds simple. But a lot can go wrong, and even when everything succeeds, the time it takes to complete the process can be highly variable. Greater […]
Continue readingAPI Performance as a Function of Call Location
Some weeks ago, I created API monitors that call the World Bank’s Countries API from four different locations: Ireland, Oregon (U.S. West Coast), Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. (U.S. East Coast). All four monitors request the World Bank information for Brazil. Here’s a recent view of my API Science Dashboard for these monitors: Each monitor is […]
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