So many exciting new features!
Tabbed views, performance metrics, the all-new API edit pane,
Service Level Objective tracking & more.
As we race through 2022, we have a lot of feature changes coming. They’re designed to make APImetrics easier to use so you can focus on managing API performance and data – not just for the APIs you own, but all the ones you rely on.
We’ve already rolled out the tabbed API edit pane. Now it’s easier than ever to see results, insights and stats. And we’re adding a tabbed provider home page that’s going to revolutionize the way you manage and track SLAs.
This is all leading up to our debut of APImetrics V3, which will include even more features and add a raft of new services – including a marketplace where you can directly integrate other tools and products from gateways, through to security and observability tools.
Contact us if you’d like to be part of the beta!
Tabbed Home Page with SLO Manager!
Right from the login, you’ll see that we have changed the Provider/Project Home page to include tabs. The summary tab is the home page you’re used to, and the settings and audit tabs have been brought front and center.
The real changes are with the Performance tab, which gives you the following features:
- Daily, Weekly, and Monthly performance metrics for all your APIs
- A column picker to choose performance metrics like latency, downtime, availability, apdex number, and more
- SLO management – pick Service Level Objectives and instantly see which APIs meet them – you can also set provider-wide SLOs
- Regional and data center cloud metrics
- Expert options for the reports you create to CSV using the same columns you’ve set
Project owners and editors can save their SLOs, API.expert subscribers will be able to experiment with the numbers and see what that does to reports but won’t be able to save their work. We have a solution coming for that later though.
Within this view are performance change alert settings so you can define the amount that the API should change either in absolute or percentage terms before the API needs to be looked at.
This will drive new, improved performance change alerting and in V3, when we are fully integrated into your CI/CD flows you will be able to see performance impacting changes within a day of pushing a new build!
New API Edit Pane
The API edit pane has changed a lot too. Here all the tools you need to create API calls and track performance and metrics are in one place, with tabs for key functionalities. Currently, the tabs are set to:
- Summary – this is evolving and will include places to store spec information and information about the hosting of the API, as well as tags, descriptions and notes
- Edit pane – including all assertions, triggers, the last result, and the option to run locally through your browser for debugging
- Advanced – settings for handling call retry and more
- Stats – the stats for the API
- Insights – AI driver insights
- Results – all the results in the same tab
- Audit – the change log for the API
Within the results view you now have an ‘investigation mode’ which lets you zero in on the results around events and see what other things were going on – and it’s all easier than ever.
Other Changes on APIMetrics
New Mandatory Settings for SLOW and RETRY
The new performance reports make it easier to see the % of SLOW calls and determine your downtime. However, we have determined that we needed to tweek some of the settings to help everybody get started moving forward.
- SLOW settings – after analyzing several million API calls we have determined what the ideal performance for all APIs should be from a networking perspective and we will be applying that to all calls – this will be on the DNS lookup components and TCP connect times
- Retry on Failure – as we can now calculate DOWNTIME for use with SLOs we need to determine if a failure is an actual FAIL or a one off issue that can be ignored. We will be setting a policy on the default schedule for an automatic retry on failure to immediately retry the call from the same agent and then, if the next call is a pass, ignore the failure. We will, however, log the Retry as an event and identify it as an outlier for the purposes of quality scoring with CASC
Container-based Agents
Our agents are now container-based for easy deployment – inside your firewall or elsewhere. If you’re interested in trying these out inside your firewall or in your own hosting/cloud setup, let us know and we’ll bring you into the beta!
New Open API Importer (coming soon)
We are working on a new OAI spec importer which will make it easier to import and set up your APIs. We became members of the OAI to ensure that our product works as effectively as possible with the spec and everything being added to it, and we’re looking forward to this going live.
Project and API Summary Tabs
The provider and API call summary tabs are going to become a lot more powerful too, this is where you’re going to be able to:
- Store provider/API level information for reference – like the location of specs, well-known information, Postman collections and more
- Leave notes for other users about the API
- See data about the API like where we estimate the solution is hosted, on which cloud and, if we can determine it, the CDN used, and the gateway
INTO THE FUTURE!
Our goal is to give API developers, users, and consumers a one-stop solution for their performance and related needs.
This is going to lead to the creation of our very own marketplace where we’re going to be offering integrations into partner products like security tools, data schema validation tools (where you’ll be able to perform continuous validation checks on production systems), and observability functionality where we will be allowing you to integrate into your preferred API traffic analysis tool and blend that data directly with your synthetic traffic.
We are also going to make it easier to create your own custom collections from our API.expert API performance directory!
And Finally… API Science
We have one last announcement, in case you missed it.
We have acquired API Science in the last few months. Nothing is going to change immediately but we are intending to merge the API Science product features into APImetrics where applicable and give all API Science users access to our complete product suite.
If you’d like to learn more, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me personally at [email protected].
