Every week at APImetrics, we take stock of the movers and shakers, winners and losers of API performance in the industry’s biggest categories – Fintech, Open Banking, Enterprise, Social Networks, and more. You can see our weekly API performance roundups here.
For our monthly reports, we like to take a bit of a deeper dive into any trends we’ve seen. And for March, there was indeed a trend, albeit a disturbing one – the continuing failure of many of the US Government’s APIs.
Frankly we wish they’d unplug it and plug it back in again (both the API Machine and the government as a whole, but we digress).
In any case, let’s take a look at what on earth happened.
We did discuss US Government API performance at length, but as usual, the pictures tell the story.
The Deptartment of Energy in the was in the Red Zone with a CASC score of 3.28, which is dismal.
This was primarily because of a very high percentage (>98%) of calls being classified as slow outliers in the period starting 25 March to the end of the month. You can clearly see this rendered above, as it lights up like a Christmas tree.
Performing only slightly better was Veterans Affairs, which was also in the Red Zone with a CASC score of 3.38. This was because of an outage on 25-27 March with HTTP status code 503 Service Unavailable responses being returned.
Were these events somehow connected? Who can say; the government certainly doesn’t seem to be monitoring APIs very closely, if at all. Yes, one was an outage and one was because of outliers. But they both add up to really bad API performance.
Next up we have the Department of Commerce. Still in the Red Zone with its sister agencies, but with a higher CASC score of 4.93.
Their problems came mostly at the beginning of the month, with a major cluster on 3-5 March with some timed-out calls. But there are a number of clusters of slow calls during the month as well.
These were the worst offenders, but the Department of Justice and FEMA didn’t fare too well, either.
We continue to be perplexed by this poor API performance from the US Government, and hey, Uncle Sam – we’re here whenever you’re ready to start monitoring your mission-critical APIs.
