This Week’s API Highlights
- GOV.UK in the UK Government category and Department of Justice in the US Government category share the honors for the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.86 the same as GOV.UK last week.
- Department of Justice in the US Government takes the overall title again with a median latency of 48 ms, the same as last week.
- Coronavirus COVID19 API (covid19api.com) in the Covid-19 category takes the overall Wooden Spoon again this week with a CASC score of 4.02 up from 3.88 last week.
- We take a look at the Messaging APIs category and how outliers can impact API performance.
Something of interest
Messaging APIs is a pretty competitive category. All 9 APIs are in the Green Zone, which is good, although only two have a CASC score of 9.00 or over, with Zoom topping the table with a CASC score of 9.16, the lowest among table-topping APIs this week.
We have arranged the table by descending number of outliers. Twilio has the most at 4.93% and, as you can see it is lit up like a Christmas tree. 13 March looks a bad day for outliers, but they are spread through the week.
Twilio has a 100% pass rate, so these are just slow calls that pass. The Twilio endpoint we monitor sends an SMS.
You could argue that SMS is a best-effort service. The message gets there when it gets there. It will usually be pretty quick, but if it gets delayed because of exceptional latency at the API endpoint, so it goes.
Don’t use SMS for time-critical communications.
Of course, how long the SMS takes to get to its destination will depend on the mobile network and that might be the rate-determining component (we don’t measure that because it is not directly related to the performance of the API), but adding, in nearly 5% of calls, tens of seconds on latency on to the time it takes for the text to be received because of the API is not ideal.
This kind of behavior can easily have a big impact on user experience.
Cisco WebEx Teams is offers a stark contrast. Of the six Cisco Webex Teams endpoints we monitor, three had no outliers at all last week. The most is with the List Rooms endpoint at 1.6% and as you can see the endpoint simply isn’t impacting in the same way as Twilio.
Note that both APIs have the same CASC score. The Cisco WebEx Teams List Rooms endpoint is the worst performing endpoint in the category, so it is dragging down Cisco WebEx Teams overall. The endpoint is slow as well as having some outliers, so speeding it and reducing the outliers will improve its quality.
This is why you need to be monitoring your APIs actively. You need to understand how the different aspects of API performance are affecting user quality so that you can address any issues proactively before your clients are affected. And outliers can seem unimportant. If 5% of calls are slow, but still getting through, does that really matter? It will depend, of course, but the extra latency might cause an application that uses the API to time. There can be an avalanche effect that you are not even aware of, but that you will be blamed for when the user finds it is the caused by API outliers.
That’s why you have to know your API to be able to squeeze out every last drop of performance.
API Analysis: Top Performers by Latency
Week Ending 1 March 2021
Category |
Organization |
CASC score
|
Corporate
|
GitHub |
9.62 |
COVID-19 |
WHO |
9.49 |
Search
|
|
9.54 |
Social Networks
|
|
9.67 |
UK Government
|
GOV.UK |
9.86 |
US Government
|
Department of Justice |
9.86 |
Messaging APIs
|
Zoom |
9.16 |
API Analysis: Top Performers by Latency
Week Ending 15 March 2021
Category |
Organization |
Median Latency
|
Corporate Infrastructure
|
Microsoft Office |
220 ms |
COVID-19 |
WHO |
85 ms |
Search
|
|
389 ms |
Social Networks
|
|
55 ms |
UK Government
|
Police.UK |
83 ms |
US Government
|
Department of Justice |
48 ms |
Messaging APIs
|
Slack |
263 ms |
API Analysis: Worst Quality
Week Ending 15 March 2021
Category |
Organization |
CASC score
|
Corporate Infrastructure
|
Nobody under 8.00!
|
|
COVID-19 |
4.02 |
|
Search
|
Nobody under 8.00! |
|
Social Networks
|
Nobody under 8.00!
|
|
UK Government
|
NHS |
6.17 |
US Government
|
NASA
|
6.84 |
Messaging
|
Nobody under 8.00!
|
7.79 |
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