One of the things about APIs is that they’re complicated. There’s a lot of things that can and do wrong. So there are many metrics that we measure for each API. That’s why we came up with the CASC Score as part of our APIContext Insights analytics package. CASC stands for Cloud API Service Consistency.
What is a CASC Score?
Simply put, you don’t want to know just that your API is performing. You also want to know HOW it is performing. Our CASC Score is a number between 0 and 1000 that tells you how well an API performed over a period of a week or a month.
You can see at a glance how an API is behaving and how this compares to any other measured API, whether one of your own or that of your suppliers, your partners, and customers.
The higher the CASC Score, the better. If your CASC Score is higher this week compared to last week, you know your API is getting better. If it’s lower, you know your API is getting worse.
Most APIs are good APIs. A CASC Score of over 800 indicates few if any issues. Between 400 and 800, there are some issues that need to be looked at. And below 400? That means you are using or exposing a bad API that has very serious problems that need to be resolved as soon as possible.
And the CASC Score is an easy and transparent way of measuring whether an API is meeting its Service Level Agreement. Simply specify a CASC Score that the API must meet. If it’s higher than that for the period you’re interested in (a week or month), you know the SLA has been met.
How do we do it?
Think of the CASC Score as a bit like a credit rating. We take all of the metrics we have for each API, blend them together, then compare the result against our unrivaled dataset of historical API test records. This gives us a single number that is automatically benchmarked against all the other APIs monitored by APIContext.
As for how we do the blending and the benchmarking, well, that’s our little secret! You don’t expect Coke or KFC to give away their recipe, do you? But let it be understood that it does involve state of the art machine learning technology.
Learn More
Read more about the APIContext CASC Score – or even better, find out your API’s CASC Score for free.
Want to see firsthand how APIContext and the CASC Score can help you understand how the APIs that matter to you are really behaving?
Sign up for a free two-week trial of APIContext.
If you’re interested in more information about the APIContext CASC scoring system, download our White Paper by filling in the form below.
