Brought Low by a Humble Bug in the Google+ People API

I remember when Google+ was a thing. And then when it was a thing again. Both those periods were a long time ago. But it was still a shock to see that Google+ is soon to be shuttered for good – and to learn that it was brought low by a humble bug in the Google+ People API. We've said it before: you've got to keep on monitoring your APIs once they are in production. In the case of Google+, it looks as though the bug arose through Google+ People API's interaction with a change in the Google+ codebase. The [...]

By |2018-10-18T11:16:51+00:00October 17th, 2018|API Update, Enterprise IT, Opinion|0 Comments
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API Compliance Monitoring – Can you afford not to?

In the rapidly expanding fields of Open Banking, where there are regulations driven by systems like the European Payment Services Directive, you have to prove your IT systems work as the regulations require – AND, just to add a little extra complexity, some of the dependencies might be entirely outside your control! But when it comes to API Compliance Monitoring, the dirty secret of most testing and DevOps strategies is that they’re more interested in being able to prove the IT systems are working at all than working the way they’re meant to be. Compliance - Can [...]

By |2018-08-10T10:14:57+00:00August 9th, 2018|Fintech, Opinion|0 Comments
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Why API Monitoring?

Why API Monitoring One of the questions we get asked all the time is the deceptively simple: Why API monitoring? After all, companies and DevOps groups use LOTS of different monitoring tools. There’s the tool suite that come with their Amazon or Microsoft Cloud instance. There are stack monitoring tools for their backend, like New Relic or App Dynamic. There are the tools built into Axway or Apigee gateways. Then there are whole sets of web tools, from simple pings of a website to complex scripting tools, and a whole range of options for monitoring the network itself. [...]

By |2018-08-08T10:25:41+00:00August 8th, 2018|Cloud, Enterprise IT, Government, IT and Cloud, Opinion, Programming Tips|0 Comments
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The Open Banking Revolution Will Be Delayed

Recently, there has been a spate of interesting articles on the state of open banking in the UK. And "state" appears to be the operative word. As an openbanking.space article opines, Anyone with a LinkedIn account will see several articles a day extolling the virtues of open banking, and the potential it has to revolutionise behaviour in retail banking. The implication here is that this is all hype and, six months in, there is no revolution to televise yet: Open banking has not set the UK on fire. Which may very well be true. The HSBC app has been getting [...]

By |2018-08-15T08:24:28+00:00July 6th, 2018|Fintech, Opinion|0 Comments
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Watching The Connectors – SAP, Mulesoft, Cloud Elements, Oh My!

The SAP blog has a post on their new SAP Cloud Platform Open Connectors. Now, this idea is not new. In fact, I might even go as far as to suggest that great minds think alike; some of our readers might remember back to the dim and distant days of prehistory and feeds and even Viafo. Heck, this was what SOG (the Service Order Gateway) was doing back in the late 1990s when I worked on it at Ericsson. All APIs are abstraction layers. In the case of SOG, it presented a consistent interface to the Customer Administration System that [...]

By |2018-08-15T08:39:22+00:00June 14th, 2018|Opinion|0 Comments
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Think Before You cURL

I just want to reiterate something that I wrote a blog post about last April. When it comes to monitoring your APIs, it really isn't a good idea to rely on cURL scripts. Let's say you just want a heartbeat for an API. OK, you write a cURL command that exercises the API. Simples. You set up some kind of cron job. You are probably going to need some kind of log. What happens if the API doesn't return a 200? So you will need to hook the script up some kind of alerting system. And then where is the [...]

By |2018-06-13T16:37:37+00:00June 13th, 2018|Opinion|0 Comments
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AISP: It’s All Kicking Off

You know the future has arrived when you see an advert for it for it on an obscure Sky satellite channel. In this case, what is kicking off is the availability of apps from Account Information Service Providers (AISPs). AISPs might be as exciting or as glamorous as PISPs (Payment Initiation Service Provider). And we might debate whether they are going to change banking forever – or even why you would really want to use one. But Mint have been providing account aggregation in the US for years already and a lot of people do have multiple accounts from different [...]

By |2018-06-07T10:22:13+00:00June 5th, 2018|Fintech, Opinion|0 Comments
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KPIs, SLOs and Other API TLAs

There's a fascinating article over at Medium by on API Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) by Michael Leppitsch, who works on Digital Strategies for Global Enterprises at Google Cloud. Here at APImetrics, we are very interested in API Service Level Objectives (SLOs). What's the difference between an SLO and a KPI? SLOs are generally part of a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which typically made between two parties, one exposing the API and the other consuming it. KPIs aren't the only measure A KPI could be the same as an SLO, for instance, that the median latency of an API be less [...]

By |2018-06-07T10:25:12+00:00June 5th, 2018|Opinion, Programming Tips|0 Comments
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Why we monitor, and why you should to… CMA9 Open Banking Edition

Fresh from congratulating a UK CMA9 bank on keeping their V1 and V2 APIs going for a decent period beyond the February switchover, we had a deeper look to see if the two APIs performed differently. For the most part, they did not, in fact, they were almost identical, except for this period between May 1st and May 5. During that 5 day window the V2 API dramatically improved, speedwise, so we decided to take a look at that. Afterall, who wouldn't always want to have a faster API? The data showed that rather than actually getting faster, the [...]

By |2018-05-17T11:56:01+00:00May 17th, 2018|News, Opinion|0 Comments
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API Monitoring: There’s No Taking The 5th

Most of the world is probably aware of the 5th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Most countries have their own version: No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself… While it is an essential part of a good legal system, we all know that there’s always a cloud that hangs over its use in certain situations. Why did they take the 5th? What are they hiding? For individuals, it’s a right and it should be defended. But what about an API? Compare the 5th Amendment to this clause from [...]

By |2018-05-03T08:00:25+00:00May 2nd, 2018|Opinion, Sectors|0 Comments
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