Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2021

Essential Guide to API Monitoring: Basics Metrics & Choosing the Best Tools

APIs have become the de-facto standard in building and running modern applications. They are an integral part of the automation workflow of any business and as more users rely on your APIs to power their applications, the need for them to be reliable is important. Any degradation in their health, availability, and performance will impact your business, so ensuring its reliability depends on proactively monitoring your APIs.

Important API metrics you should monitor

In this article, learn which API metrics you should watch and how Uptrends’ API Monitoring can help you with API tracking and reporting. It is important to know the availability, speed, and validity of API responses whether you publish an API for consumption or your website or app relies on one or more APIs. If an API slips in any of those areas, you’ve got potential trouble. Uptrends API Monitoring has multiple ways to enable you to safeguard your APIs.

Checkly: Synthetic monitoring in one minute

We let you monitor your app's frontend and APIs using the tools and language you love. Run checks on schedule or triggered by GitHub PR from 20+ global locations. When things break or get too slow, we notify you on your favorite channels like Slack or Pagerduty, Discord, SMS etc.. To monitor your frontend, we run JavaScript and open-source powered browser checks. You can configure HTTP requests on the API side and adapt them to your use case running Node.js based setup and teardown scripts. Super handy for all kinds of authentication schemes.

It's code! Synthetic monitoring with Terraform Cloud & Checkly

How does one manage monitoring in the age of digital infrastructure as code? Also as code, of course! Combining HashiCorp Terraform Cloud and Checkly enables you to configure synthetic and API monitoring as part of your existing infrastructure codebase. It is flexible, programmable and will keep you out of maintenance hell, even at scale: it is monitoring for developers. Extending your existing Terraform Cloud configuration takes only two minutes. Let's take a look together.