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API Ratings: Jan 5–12 | Messaging Latency

API Performance

Yes, dear reader, it’s still the first half of January 2021. But don’t fear, API.expert is still on the case with our weekly API ratings.

For our API ratings, we look at over 100 APIs and pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for the service quality for an organization’s APIs in a particular API ratings category with our patented CASC score.

Something of interest

We don’t usually look at the table of a category this way, but it can be illuminating to do.

api ratings jan 5-12 2021 - 1

Here we see the Messaging category by reverse Median Latency. The slowest API, Nexmo (REST) has a much better CASC score than the fastest API, Slack, which gets the wooden spoon in the category. Being fast is good – but being reliable is better.

api ratings jan 5-12 2021 - 2

Nexmo (REST) is a pretty slow API. North America is fastest region, but it’s still not fast. East and South Asia and Oceania are peculiar.

What’s the rate-determining step though? Actively monitoring your API from various cloud locations around the world lets you find that out.

api ratings jan 5-12 2021 - 3

Process Time is where we are seeing the bulk of the latency. That suggests that looking at what is happening on the server-side would be useful be identifying what could be optimized to improve the performance of the API.

api ratings jan 5-12 2021 - 4

Slack is not very different. North America is the fastest region by a long way in terms of Process Time. But the other regions are much slower, especially East and South Asia and Oceania.

For a global player like Slack this is potentially a significant issue. Do you really want your users in Bangalore to getting so much slower a service than in Baltimore? Does Slack even know that the performance in Brisbane is worse than in Boston?

Unless you are actively monitoring from the end-user perspective you aren’t going to really understand what your users are experiencing. And if you don’t understand that, someone who does might eat your lunch.

So get actively monitoring!

API Ratings: Overall Quality

Week Ending 11 January 2021

Category

Organization

CASC score

Corporate
Infrastructure

GitHub

9.55

COVID-19

WHO

9.45

Search

Microsoft Bing

9.26

Social Networks

Google

9.51

UK Government

GOV.UK

9.65

US Government

Bureau of Labor Statistics

9.61

Messaging

Ring Central (Sandbox)

9.29

GOV.UK in the UK Government category takes the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.65. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional. Three of the six categories are headed by organization with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week. Sustaining a CASC score of >9.25 over a period of several weeks is a good showing and congratulations to those organizations that achieved it. This week, all seven categories are topped by an API with a CASC score of 9.26 or more.

API Ratings: Top Performers by Latency

Week Ending 11 January 2021

Category

Organization

Median Latency

Corporate Infrastructure

Microsoft Office

225 ms

COVID-19

WHO

83 ms

Search

Google

397 ms

Social Networks

Google

56 ms

UK Government

Police.UK

84 ms

US Government

Department of Justice

48 ms

Messaging

Slack

265 ms

Department of Justice in the US Government takes the overall title again with a median latency of 48 ms, the same as last week. An important caveat: medians can be misleading! An API might have a fast median latency but produce many slow outliers. So just being fast isn’t everything. You have to be reliable too if you want to have good APIs and get a high CASC score!

API Ratings: Worst Quality

Week Ending 11 January 2021

Category

Organization

CASC score

Corporate Infrastructure

Nobody under 8.00!

COVID-19

covid19api.com

5.52

Search

Nobody under 8.00!

Social Networks

Nobody under 8.00!

UK Government

NHS

6.19

US Government

NASA

6.57

Messaging

Slack

7.86
Coronavirus COVID19 API takes the overall Wooden Spoon this week with a CASC score of 5.52. See you again in a week as we head further into 2021. Also don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for December and the weekly and monthly financial API reports. We will also be publishing special reports on the State of the APIs in the 2020, so that’s something else to look forward to!

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