API Science - Introduction

Monitor all your own APIs

API Science lets you easily monitor the health, availability, and performance of your APIs. Our global infrastructure watches your APIs and our alerting engine notifies you if anything goes wrong.

We monitor all types of APIs:

  • Private APIs: APIs that power your own mobile apps or web site (also known as "unpublished" or "internal" APIs)
  • Partner APIs: APIs you offer only for select partners or customers
  • Public APIs: APIs you provide as part of public or open third-party developer program

...and the APIs you rely on

Do you rely on any third-party APIs? Are they up? Are they meeting their SLA? Are they down just for you? We can help you easily keep track of any services in your "API supply chain". Setup your own custom monitors or use our example public monitors.

Your API Dashboard

When you first log-into API Science you are brought to your personalized API monitoring dashboard. Your dashboard gives you a high-level overview of all your API monitors in two sections: the top summarizes the latest status and most critical information about your monitors and the lower section lists each of your monitors.

Creating API Monitors

To create a new API monitor click the "Add Monitor" button on the top right of your dashboard. This opens a form consisting of three main sections:

  • API test configuration: input the URL, HTTP method, parameters, headers, validations, scripting, and advanced settings.
  • Monitor settings: monitor name, test frequency, and location from which to run this monitor.
  • Test and Save: prior to saving your monitor you can click the "Test Now" button to instantly see if your call works as expected. Once your call runs correctly, click the "Save" button to begin monitoring this call.

Monitor Status Page

Each API monitor has its own status page that summarizes all the critical information and status for your monitor:

  • Monitor configuration: high-level overview of call configuration and settings (clicking the Details: Show link will expand the page to show more details)
  • Performance chart: displays response time performance for the most recent time period
  • Recent checks: results of the latest monitoring checks (clicking on the date gives you full check details including timing, validation results and call response)
  • Uptime history: graphical summary of recent up/down history including start, end and duration
  • Alerts rules configuration: define who to contact in case any validation rules for this monitor fail

Advanced API monitoring

API Science gives you powerful tools that let you monitor any API workflow no matter how complex. Do you have APIs that require authentication? Do you want to test real CRUD sequences in production? Simple GET calls not enough?

  • Multi-step monitors: define advanced monitors with any number of steps. Perform authentication then make more calls. Test RESTful CRUD workflows (create, retrieve, update, delete). Test APIs of any type.
  • JavaScript engine: need more power? Run your own custom JavaScript as part of any single or multi-step monitor. Leverage your existing JS skills and scripts.
  • User-defined variables: define and use your own variables at any stage of the API monitoring workflow: tokens, calculations, etc. Save state in one step to use later.

Reporting

API Science's reporting engine lets you run a variety of reports against your monitoring data:

  • Performance: displays response time performance for the most recent time period
  • Check History: results of all monitoring checks for the given time period
  • Alert History: detailed log of alerts sent due to validation failures on this monitor
  • Uptime History: graphical summary of uptime/downtime intervals including start, end and duration

Example Monitors

Our pre-configured API monitors let you quickly see by example how our API monitoring works. And if you happen to be a user of any of these public APIs, you can easily to add them to your list of API monitors - just click on the Add or Remove buttons in the rightmost column on this page.