API monitoring is a form of synthetic monitoring that tracks the performance, availability, and functionality of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). APIs act as the bridges between different software systems and services, allowing them to communicate and work together.
If an API doesn’t work properly, what happens?
- Applications are at risk of failing
- Dependent services and websites are impacted
- You may not meet service level agreements (SLAs)
- Your users aren’t happy with their experience
API monitoring helps you proactively identify outages and poor performing API calls. With it, you can maintain the reliability of your digital services.
Here’s why that matters.
Why is API monitoring important?
Almost every modern, business-critical application relies on APIs. To give a few examples:
- In e-commerce, APIs handle inventory updates and shipping integrations.
- In banking, APIs allow for real-time account updates and payment services.
- For SaaS applications, APIs enable connections with third-party tools like CRMs and analytics platforms.
A single API failure can disrupt entire workflows, leading to dissatisfied users.
If a user can’t complete a purchase, you lose revenue.
If a user can’t access their bank account, it erodes brand reputation and loyalty.
In any industry, the user experience has business impact. When APIs are essential for enabling user interactions with your website or services, API monitoring is necessary for detecting and addressing issues before they escalate.
Benefits of API monitoring for modern applications
Stronger application performance and reliability
API monitoring helps you track critical performance metrics such as uptime, latency, and error rates. By identifying performance bottlenecks early, you can make sure applications run optimally and meet your SLAs.
Improved user experience
APIs directly affect the end-user experience. If an API fails or slows down, users may experience website crashes, incomplete transactions, or delayed responses. API monitoring checks that APIs stay responsive so you can deliver an uninterrupted user experience.
Faster mean time to resolution (MTTR)
When issues arise, API monitoring provides actionable insights to aid you with resolving them quickly. Reducing MTTR improves efficiency and minimizes the risk of downtime.
So, API monitoring brings you multiple benefits. What kinds of APIs might you need to monitor?
What are APIs: internal, external, and third party
Internal APIs
These are the APIs created, published, maintained, and used only by people at your business.
An e-commerce business might have an inventory management API designed and used exclusively within the company. For example, when a product sells online, this API ensures the inventory is updated across internal systems including the website, point-of-sale systems, and analytics tools.
External APIs
When you create, publish, and maintain an API that is used by your customers or others outside of your company, this is known as an external API.
A bank might provide an Open Banking API to their customers and external users, allowing customers to securely share account data with budgeting tools or investment platforms.
Third-party APIs
If your services use an API published by a company that isn’t your own, this is a third-party API.
Say your business offers a SaaS application which optimizes delivery routes for logistics companies. This location-based service could rely on the Google Maps API to provide mapping, routing, and geolocation functionality.
Now you know the different types of APIs, let’s break down how API monitoring works.
Key steps in API monitoring
1. Define your metrics for API performance monitoring
You can use multiple metrics to measure API health and performance. These include:
- Response time — Measures how quickly an API processes requests.
- Uptime — Confirms if the API is available and reliable.
- Error rates — Tracks the frequency of failed API requests.
Using these metrics helps diagnose specific issues. For example, high error rates might indicate bugs in API code. Slow response times, meanwhile, could highlight server-side bottlenecks.
To get these insights, you need to create your API monitors.
2. Set up your API monitoring checks
When you configure your automated API monitoring tool, you’ll need to understand the two types of API monitors — basic and multi-step.
Both monitor types can track uptime and performance as frequently as once per minute.
Basic API monitors — For testing a single API call. The checkpoint computer sends a request to the API and receives the response. It checks:
- The time from sending the request to receiving the response.
- The response for a success code.
- It can also check the response for a specified string of characters.
Multi-step API monitors — For testing complete API interactions. This is necessary when:
- Subsequent calls require the reuse of values such as product IDs, geolocation information, and user responses.
- The API requires authentication or contains page redirects.
Multi-step API monitoring can handle most use cases from the single call to many while checking responses, extracting values, and building the next request.
3. Run your tests to check API health
After you’ve defined your metrics and set up your API monitors, it’s time to start running checks.
If anything about an API response doesn’t meet expectations, the API monitoring tool records an error. Often the monitoring tool immediately issues a second test from a different monitoring location.
If that test also fails, the monitoring tool sends out an alert to notify you that the API no longer works properly. Ideally, you want your checks to look like this:
4. Analyze API monitoring results for performance insights
When your API monitoring tool is up and running, you receive easily consumable and shareable data visualization such as:
- Trend graphs, which make it easier to pinpoint recurring issues
- Heatmaps, which reveal geographic areas with poor performance that need to be optimized
- SLA compliance reports, so you can readily see if service goals are being met
The insights derived from API monitoring dashboards become invaluable for proactively identifying and resolving performance issues. As a result, you can increase reliability and strengthen the user experience.
To action these steps, you must first select the best API monitoring solution for you.
How to choose the right API monitoring tool
When deciding on an API monitoring tool, it’s important to consider:
Checkpoint coverage — Access to a global checkpoint network makes sure that your API monitoring reflects the real user experience.
North America, for instance, is pretty big. Why monitor APIs from a New York checkpoint if your users are in Boston? Or from Dallas if your users are in Houston?
Uptrends gives you unmatched coverage with checkpoints in 233 cities across 67 countries, so you can deliver API reliability worldwide.
You need the ability to track uptime, define your response time limits, and trigger real-time alerts when APIs are in trouble. No matter where APIs are located.
The accuracy of your insights — You require real-world API insights to make the right decisions. Uptrends’ intuitive multi-step API monitoring mimics actual usage, giving you true API performance and latency.
It lets you retrieve data from each API call and use it in follow-up requests. It also lets you test multi-stage authentication scenarios and run concurrent tests (more on why this is helpful in a few scrolls).
These capabilities make it easy to analyze API usage behavior and deepen your understanding of the real user experience.
Ease of setup and integration — Tools should make your job easier, not harder. Complex configuration and API test creation is time-consuming, which is where automatic variables come in handy (think built-in timestamps or GUIDs).
For more advanced scenarios, you need the ability to test CRUD operations, add pre- and post-API scripting, and validate error handling.
With Uptrends, you get the choice of a no-code setup, making it possible to configure and deploy API monitoring in 5 minutes (we don’t call ourselves intuitive for nothing).
Once you’ve picked your API monitoring tool , here’s what it can bring to the API lifecycle.
How API production monitoring fits in the API lifecycle
The API lifecycle is the process of creating, managing, and maintaining an API until its eventual retirement. Managing the API lifecycle is essential for delivering seamless integrations, enhancing user experiences, and adapting to changing business needs. It follows multiple steps.
1. Design & planning — The API lifecycle begins by defining the API’s structure, functionality, and purpose so it meets business and user needs.
2. Development & testing — The API is then coded and rigorously tested. This makes sure it performs as expected and meets quality standards.
3. Deployment — After testing, the API is deployed to production environments. It is then accessible to users and integrated systems.
4. Maintenance & optimization — Ongoing monitoring, troubleshooting, and updates in this phase optimize API performance and adapt the API to evolving requirements.
API production monitoring plays an important role in this lifecycle, particularly for:
3. Deployment
- Validate API performance immediately after deployment by running tests on response times, uptime, and functionality from global checkpoints.
- Confirm endpoint availability and identify potential issues during production rollouts.
- Ensure that SLAs are being met from day one, providing confidence in API readiness.
4. Maintenance & optimization
- Continuously monitor APIs across regions to detect downtime, errors, or performance degradation in real time.
- Track key metrics for ongoing optimization opportunities.
- Get immediate alerts for anomalies, which drives quick troubleshooting and minimizes the impact on users.
To further your deployment and maintenance efforts, you can also adopt concurrent monitoring into the API lifecycle.
Concurrent monitoring: why it matters and for who
Concurrent monitoring for APIs in production tests multiple API endpoints, workflows, or services simultaneously.
This is crucial for DevOps and ITOps teams managing high-demand systems where APIs handle complex, multi-step processes. In these scenarios, a single-point failure can disrupt entire workflows.
A real-time, comprehensive view of API performance is useful for:
- Microservices-based applications — Here, APIs often interact with dozens (or hundreds) of services. Concurrent monitoring tracks these APIs simultaneously to check for bottlenecks or failures in any part of the system.
- Multi-region monitoring — For global businesses, concurrent monitoring enables simultaneous API tests from multiple geographic locations. This ensures a consistent experience worldwide, wherever your users are based, and helps detect region-specific issues.
- Payment gateway monitoring — APIs are vital for transaction processing, fraud detection, and currency conversions. Concurrent monitoring checks each step of the payment workflow performs reliably, preventing transaction failures and revenue loss.
- CI/CD pipeline testing — During continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), concurrent monitoring checks that APIs remain functional throughout deployments. This lets you catch issues caused by updates before they impact the user experience.
- Third-party API dependencies — Applications often rely on third-party APIs, for instance to access shipping, social media, or weather data. Concurrent monitoring tracks helps you identify and respond quickly to third-party disruptions.
Alongside monitoring external and third-party APIs, you can extend monitoring to include APIs inside your private network. As a result, you can provide the same level of reliability and performance for internal APIs.
Here’s how it works.
How to monitor APIs inside your private network
For internal API monitoring, Uptrends allows you to set up Private Checkpoints that operate behind your firewall.
First, create a Private Checkpoint by deploying Uptrends’ container-based solution on your infrastructure.
Once configured, create a new API monitor and select the Private Checkpoint as the monitoring location.
This setup enables continuous monitoring of your private APIs, supporting use cases such as:
HR and payroll integration
An company’s HR and payroll systems communicate via internal APIs to sync employee data and process salaries.
For IT Managers and Systems Administrators, monitoring these APIs helps you safeguard accurate and timely payroll processing for your HR function.
Internal communications tools
Email services and comms platforms keep your team members connected.
Network Administrators and IT Support Specialists can maintain seamless communication and collaboration by monitoring the APIs these tools rely on.
Inventory management and sales platforms
In e-commerce, inventory management systems uses private APIs to update stock levels across various sales channels.
Operations Analysts and e-Commerce Managers must monitor these APIs to guarantee accurate stock information, prevent overselling, and keep customers happy.
Ensuring robust internal API monitoring is crucial for maintaining seamless operations across business functions.
Is Uptrends the right API monitoring solution for you?
If you’re responsible for system reliability and performance in production, we’re made for you.
We’ve worked with Solution Architects, Enterprise Architects, IT Operations Managers, Integrations Specialists, and more to look after API health and verify compliance with SLAs.
Your job is to preempt problems and guarantee consistent service delivery to end-users. From monitoring internal, external, and third-party APIs to identifying if internal issues are affecting performance, Uptrends gives you a full suite of tests to easily check APIs in production.
Get started with API monitoring
APIs are the foundation of modern digital ecosystems. Monitoring them is essential to ensure 24x7 API performance and reliability. Want more handy resources? Check out our knowledge base for further help with API monitoring.
Or if you’re ready to get hands-on and take control of your API performance…
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