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CASC scoring deals with one of the challenges of understanding what your Key Performance Indicators KPIs for APIs are telling you – how you come to terms, easily and quickly with large amounts of data in a meaningful way. 

This has been recognized before with systems like Apdex, but these have been, generally, very simplistic approaches to dealing with the challenges of performance and quantifying it.

Building on the success of the ‘credit score’ in the financial sector, APIContext has developed Cloud API Service Consistency (CASC) scoring to give a simple indication of the quality and health of a specific API or group of APIs and allow for easy, like-for-like comparisons between different systems.

The closer to 10 your CASC Score is, the closer to perfect performance. Our scoring engine takes into account pass rates, error rates, outliers detected and the general consistency of performance – for example, it might be possible to have a slow API that scores well and a fast API that scores poorly due to inconsistent performance.

What it means for you

Simply put, you don’t want to know just that your API is performing. You also want to know HOW it is performing. Our CASC Score is a number between 0 and 10 that tells you how well an API performed over a period of a week or a month.

You can see at a glance how an API is behaving and how this compares to any other measured API, whether one of your own or that of your suppliers, your partners, and customers.

The higher the CASC Score, the better. If your CASC Score is higher this week compared to last week, you know your API is getting better. If it’s lower, you know your API is getting worse.

Most APIs are good APIs. A CASC Score of over 8 indicates few if any issues. Between 6 and 8, there are some issues that need to be looked at. And below 6? That means you are using or exposing a bad API that has very serious problems that need to be resolved as soon as possible.

And the CASC Score is an easy and transparent way of measuring confidence in how well an API is doing.

How do we do it?

Think of the CASC Score as a bit like a credit rating or a net promoter score but for the quality of your API or microservices. We take all of the metrics we have for each API, blend them together, then compare the result against our unrivaled data set of historical API test records. This gives us a single number that is automatically bench-marked against all the other APIs monitored by APIContext.

As for how we do the blending and the bench-marking, well, that’s our little secret! You don’t expect Coke or KFC to give away their recipe, do you? But let it be understood that it does involve state of the art machine learning technology.

What does the CASC score mean?

8.00 up – Good! A healthy API

Everything is looking in good shape, you should have minimal problems you need to look into. Keep it up and watch for changes.

6.00 – 7.99 – Issues – needs attention

There are issues that should be looked into – it might be latency or inconsistent service but there will be things impacting user expectations.

5.99 and lower – Poor performing API

The API will have significant performance issues every week representing lost time and wasted engineering effort in response.

Can I improve my score?

If you’re an APIContext customer, along with all the other analysis of the performance of your critical APIs that we do, we also provide you with details on why a score is what it is and what areas of the performance you need to focus on in order to improve things.

APImetrics insights page api performance metrics CASC score

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