About David O'Neill

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So far David O'Neill has created 92 blog entries.

Equifax and AWS: How One Minor Thing Can Pull Down Performance

It's always fascinating to us how your choice of Cloud Host can impact your performance. For example, we noticed some issues with the Equifax API we monitor. There are a lot of issues. Over the last week alone, there have been protracted periods when the endpoint doesn't respond to queries at all which affected everyone. However, we did notice a significant difference in latency between the 4 major clouds. AWS calls were, on average, almost 1.5 seconds longer than calls made from other clouds. When we drilled into this, we could see that for some reason DNS calls made [...]

By | 2018-04-18T08:29:45+00:00 April 16th, 2018|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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API Standards: Who Watches the Watchmen?

I am fond of the saying, Who watches the watchers? When applied to the API sector, it addresses a very real problem: How do you manage standards and adherence to standards in the API space? Nacha, the payments association, have announced new standards for electronic payments APIs. The work is being led by Apigee and Accenture, two major players in enterprise APIs. Apigee famously provided one of the major gateway products, and was acquired by Google. Accenture does consulting for many, if not all of the major global finance companies. Standards make sense We see a lot of divergence around [...]

By | 2018-04-18T01:46:54+00:00 April 16th, 2018|Opinion, Sectors|0 Comments
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Daily and Weekly Status Mails

We've now added one of the features that everybody has been asking for, daily and weekly alert status mails. The emails will initially cover the basics - the number of calls you've made, the number of APIs monitored and not monitored and the alerts you've had during that day or week. Each monitored API and API shared within your organization is reported with the pass rate for the day/week, the median latency and the CASC score associated with the call. Over the next few months we'll also be adding the following: Insight data that is meaningful - bottlenecks, either [...]

By | 2018-04-07T09:52:36+00:00 April 7th, 2018|Feature updates, Housekeeping, Programming Notes|0 Comments
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PSD2, Open Banking and North America: Part II of II

This is part II of a two-part series. To jump back, read this first. The paradigm within PSD2 and open banking generally is that anyone can connect to anyone. A few US banks have shown some interest in using external APIs, but generally only to connect to a limited number of partners. So, the US model is very much closed banking. So there are likely few open banking API developer programs in the US that we can join. Capital One is, of course, a notable exception, although they are not really promoting true European-style open banking. Companies that provide [...]

By | 2018-04-07T08:52:10+00:00 April 6th, 2018|Fintech, Opinion, Sectors|0 Comments
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PSD2, Open Banking and North America: Part I of II

It is universally accepted that Europe is far ahead of North America in the development of open banking. What activity there is mainly focuses on aggregation. But this is just one part of PSD2 (the account-related component). The payment component is much less developed. The best-known aggregator is Mint, but there are a number of other companies in this space (Acorns, Digit, Kabbage, Betterment). Mint has been around for a number of years now, but many banks are still reluctant to let third parties access customer information. This means that aggregator apps are often still reliant on screen scraping [...]

By | 2018-04-05T08:36:00+00:00 April 5th, 2018|Fintech, Opinion, Sectors|0 Comments
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CMA9: 35% of Banking APIs Miss Acceptable Performance Targets

During the month of March, APImetrics monitored the quality of 102 CMA9 APIs, approximately 25 of these were V1 APIs, which were all deprecated during the month. Of the remaining V2 APIs, over a third of these APIs failed to meet the standard of good quality as measured by the APImetrics Cloud API Service Consistency score, the credit score for API quality. Danske Bank (https://danskebank.com/) and Bank of Ireland (https://www.bankofireland.com/) hold the top 10 spots with scores near to a perfect 999. Analysis of results with APImetrics clients shows that scores below 800 lead to increased performance and quality [...]

By | 2018-04-04T09:04:50+00:00 April 2nd, 2018|Fintech, Monthly Report|0 Comments
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Active + Passive Monitoring = Rapid Problem Resolution

We talk a lot about active and passive monitoring. Passive monitoring is how your stack and services are doing. Active is calling services externally like APImetrics does. But what does this mean in practise? Let's take a real example from a customer. One of their users logged a service complaint, and the internal SRE (Service Reliability Engineering) team checked their passive monitoring. Server logs in Splunk, and APM from AppDynamics both showed green. They were happy that everything was working fine. Then the customer support team checked the APImetrics logs and found that there was a mixture of 4XX [...]

By | 2018-04-04T09:16:00+00:00 March 30th, 2018|Case Studies, Enterprise IT, Programming Tips|0 Comments
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SLAs in a Cloud World: Getting What You Pay For

When it comes to your SLA, no service has 100% uptime. Things need to be maintained. It takes time to update something. There will be periods where something, somewhere has gone wrong. We know this, and we think we accept it – but do we? Many services are expected to come with some form of Service Level Agreement (SLA) and defining that for services that you provide or consume is a challenge for every organization on the planet, no matter how large they are. Google offers an SLA on their Cloud Compute platform. It's complicated, but you can get [...]

By | 2018-04-02T12:16:50+00:00 March 30th, 2018|Cloud|0 Comments
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200 OK? Check Again.

Something we've talked a LOT about is when an API returns a HTTP 200 ok code, but the API returns an error. This can be a challenge for a gateway's passive monitoring and backend services to spot because, technically, nothing went wrong. Take a look at one we had just this morning from the APIs for a major IoT provider. HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2018 09:10:52 GMT Server: Apache Vary: Accept-Encoding { "status": 2XXX, "body": {}, "error": "An unknown error occurred: Maintenance mode, please check http://status.fakename.com/" } It's vital to have active monitoring that not only [...]

By | 2018-03-23T09:47:05+00:00 March 22nd, 2018|Opinion, Programming Tips|0 Comments
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What Do Telecoms And Banks Have In Common? APIs.

What do telecoms and banks have in common when it comes to APIs? Well, in the early days of the API revolution – as long as 3 or 4 years ago! – there was a race by telecoms to open up their backend services to APIs. The logic was they could monetize services like SMS, MMS, location, payment and so forth. What they wanted to avoid was being relegated to a role purely as a data and call provider. As a monitoring company, we did a number of projects with them. And one of the clear facts that emerged [...]

By | 2018-03-21T08:53:57+00:00 March 21st, 2018|Fintech, Opinion, Telco|0 Comments
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