Articles on Enterprise IT APIs

Healthcare API Economy: Long Overdue

  This week, Don Rucker MD, the National Coordinator for Health IT, proposed a healthcare API economy. This is something that's long overdue, especially in the USA, and shadows the changes that the banking sector, and before that the telecommunications sectors have gone through. However, it has its own unique risks and challenges that need to be carefully considered as the move happens. If you build healthcare APIs they might not come One of the many challenges for the telecommunications sector was that they were slow to adopt the right technologies. The innovations they wanted to be part of ended [...]

2019-02-16T09:54:18-08:00By |News, Enterprise IT, Opinion|
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Free Puppy!!! (AKA Free Software Is Rarely Free)

We do that! It really doesn’t matter what ‘that’ is. It could be API monitoring, it could be networking monitoring, it could be security services. It could be one of a dozen things. But the sales team for your infrastructure vendor is sure they do it or have a module for it, and they’ll do it for you for free as part of the large contract you’re signing with them. This offer of free software (or security or whatever) reminds me of two common problems. Problem one: the ‘free puppy problem’ Somebody gives you a free puppy. That’s great! You [...]

2020-07-07T09:31:58-07:00By |Opinion, Enterprise IT, Fintech|
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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 [...]

2018-10-18T11:16:51-07:00By |API Update, Enterprise IT, Opinion|
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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. [...]

2018-08-08T10:25:41-07:00By |Opinion, Cloud, Enterprise IT, Government, IT and Cloud, Programming Tips|
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Active + Passive Monitoring = Rapid Problem Resolution

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...

2020-02-24T18:45:47-08:00By |Programming Tips, Case Studies, Enterprise IT|
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Monitoring the Untestable – A White Paper from APImetrics

APImetrics has just published Monitoring the Untestable, a new white paper that focuses on the Catch-22* at the heart of PSD2 and open banking: if you don’t actively monitor your production environment with synthetic transactions, you have no idea whether your bank’s APIs are truly compliant at any given moment. But banks are often reluctant (with good reason) to allow testing in the live environment. As we've said, to manage your APIs, you must monitor them. But if you are only passively monitoring your APIs, you are not monitoring them – which means you are not managing them. So, it's important to actively monitor [...]

2020-07-21T08:41:35-07:00By |Cloud, Enterprise IT, Fintech, IT and Cloud, News, Opinion, Sectors, Uncategorized, White Papers|
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Leavin’ On A Jet Plane (Or Not, If You Tried To Fly British Airways)

Were you hoping to be a passenger on a British Airways flight over the weekend? So were ten of thousands of other travelers. The sheer logistic disruption (planes in the wrong place, getting luggage where it is supposed to be) is taking several days to sort out. And that's not to mention how long it might take to sort the most pressing IT issues. BA has said the problem was caused by a power surge that led to some networking hardware failing, and then the all-important messaging systems failing. But BA was already experiencing significant IT issues on Friday, with [...]

2017-06-07T09:39:14-07:00By |Opinion, Enterprise IT, Sectors, Travel|
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What is a Web API? APImetrics Explains it All

"What is a web API?" At APImetrics, we actually get this question a lot. And I found someone asking this question recently on Quora as well. I answered it there, and I thought it'd be helpful to post it here, too. Happy learning! To understand what a web API is, it’s necessary to understand what makes a HTTP request to an API different from a HTTP request to any old URI (Universal Resource Indicator, which typically might be a webpage). Generally, we might expect that a HTTP server will return HTML. After all, it is the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. But [...]

2017-06-07T09:44:54-07:00By |Opinion, Cloud, Enterprise IT, Fintech, Government, IOT, Media, Retail, Telco, Travel, Uncategorized, Utilities|
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API Changes: Making Sure Your Calls Work After The Switch

One of the things about APIs is that they're subject to change. API changes might be because the API endpoints and methods have been changed. In this case, a good API provider will give its users plenty of warning about API changes. There will also probably be a grace period as the deprecated and new versions of the API operate side-by-side before the switch. Even if you pay for the API, it's going to be up to you to make sure the third-party API you depend on is going to ensure continuity of service. But it's all too easy to [...]

2017-06-07T09:45:23-07:00By |Uncategorized, Enterprise IT, Opinion|
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