Scheduling API Calls

Monitoring isn’t terribly useful if you have to individually run a call at a time, so we have a scheduling system to make repeated calls. With the APIContext scheduler you can:

1. Set the frequency you want to call your APIs at – this can be from once per second per location through to once a day
2. Select the locations you want to run from – this be refined to be a specific set of locations, or a region or a specific cloud
3. Set any downtime for periods you don’t want to have calls run during
4. Apply a schedule OR multiple schedules to API calls or Workflows and leave the rest to us

This tutorial will walk through setting a schedule to test from every cloud location in Europe once every 5 minutes.

Scheduling Main View

Your available schedules are shown, an individual schedule or combinations of schedules can be applied to any individual API call or Workflow. Calls are then randomly scheduled to run from remote locations at the frequency that you’ve requested. This ensures that you don’t have multiple hits from the same location at the same time.

Create a Schedule

To create a schedule, you need to decide 2 key factors:

1. The frequency you’re going to call the API at – this can be anything from 1 per second to 1 per day
2. The locations you want to call from

Frequency is selected in the dropdown menu; 12 calls per hour means that your API Endpoint will be randomly called from one of our agents out in the public cloud 12 times each hour. 

If, for example, you wanted to call your endpoints from every global location (currently 80+ locations) every hour, you’d need a frequency of between 1 and 2 calls per minute.

Some accounts have some limitations on how frequently they can run calls – so please feel free to reach out if you have specific scheduling frequency questions.

You can then pick the locations you wish to call from. You can do this by selecting a group:

1. Global regions or Worldwide
2. Individual Clouds i.e. ALL AWS, or ALL Azure
3. Finally, you can pick individual locations from the drop down.

Downtime

As we realize you may, on occasion, need to take your APIs down, we’ve added in the ability to schedule downtime on API calls. This can be used in two ways:

1. Schedule a maintenance outage
2. All for different call frequencies through the day

For example: you want to monitor proactively during the work day where most of your customers are, but reduce the call frequency to maintain heartbeat monitoring over night – you’d create 2 schedules with different frequencies, one with a downtime set to outside of office hours and the other with a downtime set in office hours.

This would then give you a heartbeat test over night and normal testing during the day.