Articles on Enterprise IT APIs

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 [...]

By |2018-11-12T02:25:43+00:00October 30th, 2018|Enterprise IT, Fintech, Opinion|0 Comments
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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 [...]

By |2018-10-18T11:16:51+00:00October 17th, 2018|API Update, Enterprise IT, 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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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+00:00March 30th, 2018|Case Studies, Enterprise IT, Programming Tips|0 Comments
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New: 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 [...]

By |2018-08-09T09:55:20+00:00February 12th, 2018|Cloud, Enterprise IT, Fintech, IT and Cloud, News, Opinion, Sectors, Uncategorized, White Papers|1 Comment
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Mini Case Study – When Did it Break?

The smoking gun - when an API goes bad. Many of our clients use our product just for monitoring the uptime of an API. But our data retention policy, and our analysis tools, add a whole important layer to the value APImetrics brings to operations management – both from a management overview approach with our CASC scoring, and for developer operations with our detailed analysis. One client, an organization with a number of branches and a requirement to provide those details publicly, had realized – both with our product and others – that one of their critical [...]

By |2017-09-28T12:13:25+00:00September 28th, 2017|Case Studies, Enterprise IT, Fintech, Government, Retail|0 Comments
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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 [...]

By |2017-06-07T09:39:14+00:00June 1st, 2017|Enterprise IT, Opinion, Sectors, Travel|0 Comments
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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 [...]

By |2017-06-07T09:44:54+00:00May 24th, 2017|Cloud, Enterprise IT, Fintech, Government, IOT, Media, Opinion, Retail, Telco, Travel, Uncategorized, Utilities|0 Comments
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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 [...]

By |2017-06-07T09:45:23+00:00May 23rd, 2017|Enterprise IT, Opinion, Uncategorized|0 Comments
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