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The Importance of API Monitoring in Maintaining Service Reliability

Why do services need API monitoring? Application programming interfaces (APIs) have become indispensable for digital business. Forbes found that 98% of developers consider APIs to be crucial to getting their work done, and 86% of developers expected their use of APIs to increase. A survey by McKinsey found that 88% of banking companies believe APIs are increasing in importance; 81% think APIs are a priority for business and IT.

A distributed software system is a bit like a modern car: There are many moving parts, and each part performs a crucial service to keep the entire system running. There are sensors to monitor the functioning of each part, such as an oxygen sensor, an engine oil level sensor, and a coolant temperature sensor. API monitoring for software applications is like the collection of sensors in your car: It ensures every part is delivering its services correctly.

Because APIs are critical for modern business, effective API monitoring is essential. Applications rely on APIs to communicate and share data, so your organization must proactively watch for and address API performance issues. API monitoring also enables your APIs to handle increased traffic as your business grows and to maintain optimal performance under different loads.

What Is API Monitoring?

API monitoring means continually scanning your APIs’ performance and availability to ensure they are functioning optimally to meet their users’ requirements. Among the issues API monitoring seeks to detect are errors, long response times, and outages. API monitoring has many use cases and helps your staff address issues before they adversely affect users or other applications.

Importance of API Monitoring

Like any service that is crucial to your business, APIs must be tracked to ensure their performance and reliability. API monitoring helps your business to:

• Minimize downtime and outages. Monitoring of APIs helps businesses identify potential issues before they cause service disruptions that could impact business operations or other services.
• Maintain optimum functioning for users. APIs are important to your business and that of your clients. Any problems could adversely impact applications across multiple organizations. A recent outage in Microsoft’s Bing API disrupted other search engines, like DuckDuckGo, which use the API. Service interruptions could cause you to lose revenue if customers cannot access your data or services. They could also impact your company’s reputation and result in lost business if they lead clients to turn to other providers.
• Make optimum use of resources. API monitoring provides useful information about which days and times your API gets the most usage. This information helps your company allocate its resources most efficiently. It can also help you when deciding which new features to add and how to scale up for increased traffic.
• Maintain security. Monitoring of APIs can help detect security vulnerabilities and cybersecurity attacks. This helps you keep your APIs safe and prevent cybersecurity-related downtime. It also helps you maintain compliance with industry regulations and standards.

Features of API Monitoring

Leading API monitoring platforms such as Uptime.com provide comprehensive monitoring capabilities to equip your organization to track all major aspects of your APIs. Some of these are:

• Real-time monitoring. API monitoring tools deliver real-time data about API functioning and performance. This enables your staff to take action promptly to resolve any issues or investigate anomalies.
• Performance analytics. API monitoring includes detailed analytics features that enable you to track and record performance metrics like throughput, latency, availability, response times, and error rates. You can identify trends and compare incoming data with baselines to quickly detect performance problems and improve future performance.
• Usage statistics. You can receive data about API usage patterns like API endpoint access and numbers and types of requests. This helps you allocate your organization’s resources most efficiently.
• Error tracking and debugging. API monitoring platforms help you track API errors and exceptions thrown. Error logs help developers debug and repair problems.
• Seamless integration with other tools. API monitoring platforms integrate directly with your other tools, like incident management platforms and analytics platforms. This helps your incident management teams to work more efficiently.

Uptime’s API monitoring helps you keep close tabs on your APIs with a codeless API scripting interface. You can create custom API transactions that combine HTTP methods to ensure your API services are functioning properly. You can also monitor your API endpoints by verifying URL response codes and HTML content. Uptime’s 30+ monitoring locations enable you to check API performance from different geographical regions. With private location monitoring, you can check both public and internal monitoring from the same interface.

Importance of API Monitoring in DevOps

DevOps teams particularly rely on API monitoring to ensure their applications are running smoothly. For DevOps teams, API monitoring provides:

• Smooth integration. With DevOps’s microservices, multiple components, and cloud-based designs, integration of various services is critical. With microservices, requests may pass through several APIs. API monitoring ensures all your components are working together and helps you troubleshoot and address issues so development can proceed on pace.
• Prompt resolution of issues. With multiple changes happening simultaneously and frequently, development teams need detailed, real-time information about the entire system at all stages of development, testing, and deployment. With continuous API monitoring, your developers can detect and resolve issues as they arise. This improves reliability and prevents future downtimes.
• Improved security and compliance. With a fast-paced development environment, security can be a concern. API monitoring can help your organization stay compliant with industry requirements and standards and identify security vulnerabilities.

API Monitoring Considerations

Here are some things to keep in mind when setting up API monitoring.

Choose the Appropriate Tools

Select the monitoring tools and designs that are most appropriate for your application. An older, infrequently used API may need less elaborate monitoring than a newer one that serves thousands of clients daily across the world. A failure in the newer interface would impact multiple stakeholders, so comprehensive monitoring is required.

Determine Monitoring Frequency

Monitoring frequencies can be set as needed. You can choose between real-time and periodic monitoring depending on your API’s usage and criticality and any service level agreements. A medical device API may need real-time monitoring, with alerts sent immediately. On the other hand, an accounting system API that is only used at the end of each month may have less severe monitoring needs.

Set Notifications

The indicators and notifications your monitoring system sends you will vary depending on the application. You can set alerts and thresholds for the metrics that are crucial to your business needs. In the previous example, the medical device API may have metrics for response time, uptime, and accuracy, while the accounting system may be most concerned with accuracy and less with response time and uptime.

For more information about Uptime’s API monitoring services visit Uptime.com to try it for free or book a demo.

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