7 reasons why API monitoring with upward trends is important

The APIs you provide and use every day impact your business.

High-performance APIs increase customer satisfaction and keep your team productive. Slow and dysfunctional APIs damage your reputation, consume support resources, and reduce your company’s overall productivity. API monitoring with Uptrends’ web services and multi-step API monitor helps you save face and keep your team on task.

APIs are everywhere, and with the growth of the cloud and the Internet of Things, their importance grows every day. If any of the APIs you provide or rely on go down or experience performance issues, the sites and services that depend on them will go down as well.

Why is API monitoring important for your business?

The effort and money spent developing, testing, and launching a website, application, or API can quickly disappear if you don’t monitor your API around the clock.

Whether developed for internal or public use, many devices, applications, and people rely on the availability, performance, and functionality of that API.

APIs fail and you need to protect your investment of time and money. We’ve compiled a list of the top reasons why API monitoring is essential.

• The API is your responsibility . When you provide an API, your users trust you to ensure that the API is highly available, fast, and robust.
• You cannot rely on regular monitoring of your website . When it comes to important APIs, it’s not enough to just check uptime or initial page load.
• Each API method must work . It may be working, but if one method on the chain fails, the entire transaction can fall apart.
• Loss of brand reputation : Do users know what an API is? Probably not. They know things won’t go well, or that things won’t work out. If your site or service has a slow, hard to use UI, or is completely broken, 75% of users will leave and never come back.
• Decreased user satisfaction : Degraded performance has a significant impact on user satisfaction with your product. Poor performance impacts every aspect of the user experience, reducing the user’s perception of the product’s design, navigation, and usability.
• Loss of current revenue : If your API stops working, your login probably won’t work, your checkout or shopping cart won’t work, and it could be so annoying that it destroys user trust. If things go wrong, users will rebound, creating revenue for your competitors.
• Future revenue suffers : If you’ve worked hard to attract customers to your service and your product doesn’t work, they’ll leave. However, users don’t stop there. they talk. They tell people about their experiences directly and online through reviews and social media. Dissatisfied users won’t return, taking away much of your future revenue from potential new customers.

As you can see, it’s important to monitor the first-party and third-party APIs required by your product. Hopefully, your third provider is monitoring your system on a regular basis, but that may not be the case. Sometimes we test randomly throughout the day, and sometimes we only test from inside the firewall.

These random tests may detect some issues, but testing from inside the firewall will not detect the issues experienced by users on the other side. To stay up and running, you need a robust monitoring system. Uptrends helps protect your investment by automating processes and testing from your location.

What are my API monitoring options?

Uptrends offers two types of API monitoring. To determine which of the two monitoring options is better for securing your API, you need to understand how your clients use your API. Keep API documentation handy so you have all the information you need to make good monitoring decisions. Determine whether the API requires multiple calls or a single call to complete a transaction.

Single-call API : A reliable yet inexpensive way to check single API calls and track API uptime is to use HTTP(S) Web Service Monitor. Web Service Monitor validates a single API response by checking uptime, checking response code, content checks, response time, response size (best choice if you want to provide SLA guarantees on your API service) ). Simple authentication is also possible. The Web Service Monitor runs once every minute.

Multi-call or multi-step APIs : When you need to handle redirects, authenticate users, or preserve and reuse information from one API call to another, use Uptrends’ multi-step API monitoring solution. Multi-step solutions allow you to extract values ​​from responses for later use, create assertions, use comparison operators, generate random values, use predefined variables, and more. , you can use authentication or access client certificates. Verify the entire process with multi-step API monitoring while tracking the performance of every API call.

Selecting APIs that require monitoring

It can be overwhelming when you start thinking about all the APIs needed to process a single user transaction. Which APIs require monitoring and which do not? Confusion is understandable, but not all APIs or functions require monitoring.

To make your choice easier, we have prepared the following list.

Monitor public APIs (internal and external)

When you publish an API, you need to test it for availability, performance, and functionality. It’s your job to respond quickly to API issues and maintain high availability.

Monitor critical third-party APIs

If an API is important to your API, app, service, or website, you should monitor it the same way you monitor your own APIs. At least consider using an uptime monitor to know when your API goes offline.

Monitor non-critical third-party APIs

Some APIs provide enhanced user experiences, such as location services, type kits, graphics, and advertising. You can also choose which APIs within this category to monitor. For example, if your advertising revenue depends on an API, you can deploy a web service monitor to ensure that the API is available.

Uptrends’ multi-step API monitoring solution makes it easy to set up even complex API interactions.

In some cases, you can’t be sure that an API will work based on a single response. In some cases, the API becomes complex and requires a large number of calls to one or more APIs to ensure that the entire transaction works. This is why Uptrends developed multi-step API monitoring .

Multi-step API monitoring provides all the flexibility you need to handle the most complex interactions. Uptrends has a unique API step builder that breaks down interactions into easy-to-understand steps. Uptrend gives you the flexibility to:

• Capture and process redirects.
• Use basic, NTLM, digest, and custom (including OAuth) authentication.
• Store, access, and use client certificates.
• Maintain, use, and securely store your certificates and login credentials with Uptrends Vault.
• Use variables: predefine, assign values, and generate random values.
• Use comparisons and assertions (validate content, response codes, response times).
• Monitor your APIs from 200 test locations around the world or monitor your internal APIs with private checkpoints behind your firewall.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. If Uptrends finds an issue with your API, our advanced alert system will let you know so you can sleep better.

takeout

• APIs power the web.
• API uptime, performance, and functionality equal revenue and reputation.
• Third-party APIs can be as damaging to your brand as API failure.
• This is an API and it is your responsibility to monitor uptime, performance, and functionality.

Uptrends API monitoring helps you improve the uptime, performance, availability, and more of your business and third-party APIs. Still not convinced? Try Uptrends API Monitoring free for 30 days . No credit card required.