The ongoing global Ransomeware cyber attack has “hit 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries” according to Europe’s cross-border police agency, Europol: Europol Director Rob Wainwright said the global reach of the attack was “unprecedented” and “pretty indiscriminate,” affecting everything from hospitals and schools to auto giants. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” he told […]
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 readingDetecting Failed API Monitor Checks Using the API Science API
In my last post, I illustrated how we can use the API Science Checks API endpoint to gather the results of recent checks for an API monitor. In that post, the example check was a successful call for my “br Ireland” monitor, which queries the World Bank Countries API for information about Brazil from a server located in Ireland. My “br_Ireland” monitor has a validation setting that requires an HTTP Response code of “200” in order for the API check to be considered successful…
Continue readingEvaluating API Monitor Checks Using the API Science API
Your API monitoring team can be alerted when an API that’s critical for your product goes down using API Science’s alerts capability, which provides the ability to notify your team about problems using email, a URL, Slack, PagerDuty, and HipChat. These methods can be extended using tools like IFTTT (IF This Then That) such that […]
Continue readingHow to Use the Results From One API Call in Another API Call
In many cases, the availability of your product depends on a sequence of API calls (to both external and internal APIs). Information retrieved from one API may be a critical input for your subsequent call to a different API. If the first call fails, the second can’t return a valid result. So, a question is: […]
Continue readingIntroduction to API Monitor Local Variables
Recent posts have talked about the capability the API Science API monitoring platform provides for creating and working with global variables that are maintained across multiple monitors. In this post, we’ll look into the platform’s capability for creating local variables that are specific to an individual API monitor. The fact is, APIs change over time. […]
Continue readingDeleting API Science Global Variables
In previous blog posts, I described how API Science monitors could be used to create global variables and retrieve and verify them. In this post, we’ll create a new monitor that deletes an API Science global variable, then study what effect this has on the earlier monitors. My “Set Dog and Meal” monitor sets the […]
Continue readingRetrieving and Verifying API Science Global Variables
In my last blog post I showed how to set API Science variables using my “Set Dog and Meal” API monitor. In this post, I show how to create a new monitor that reads and verifies the status of those parameters. The “Set Dog and Meal” monitor runs every 60 minutes, setting the following parameter/value […]
Continue readingIntroduction to API Science’s Global Variables
The API Science platform provides capability for saving, retrieving, and deleting global variables. The Parameters section on the API Science Help page provides this description: You can set any number of query string, POST, and PUT parameters using the Params input fields. Each time you add a new variable a new pair of Key/Value input […]
Continue readingUsing Slack, Zapier, HipChat, PagerDuty, IFTTT, and Todoist to Broadcast API Monitor Alerts
Today, many companies have employees that work from diverse locations around the globe. If your company’s product relies on APIs (internal and/or external), your team needs to know immediately when a critical API goes down or starts delivering invalid information. But how can you quickly communicate problems of this type to your global team? The […]
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