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Reducing costs, creating applications, designing predictive models, etc. There are many companies that use APIs to increase their competitiveness, explore and discover new markets and diversify their business. However, these new opportunities depend on monitoring how these APIs operate.
Mashape Analytics, Akana Envision and CA App Synthetic Monitor are three of the professionals tools used to measure the performance of application programming interfaces in real time. Thanks to these platforms, the development teams can keep track of performance at all times and act to solve errors.
1. Mashape Analytics
Mashape Analytics has been created internally by Mashape with the aim of controlling and measuring the performance of over 13,000 APIs used by Mashape itself to develop its microservices infrastructure, and by other companies such as Amazon, Citibank, Accenture, DHL and NASA.
Mashape claims that this tool was created to fill a gap in the market: monitoring the performance of microservices infrastructures and APIs for modern development teams. This analysis solution offers the following features:
– Real-time data: Analysis of the performance, consumption and use of an API in real time. It also measures the average latency time of the activity or errors, both on the customer’s and the server’s sides. In the final phase, the platform provides this information in a drill-down by points.
– Custom dashboards: Development teams can create dashboards to prepare reports and create filters among other options. This tool could be called the “Google Analytics of APIs”.
– API logs: Everything that happens in a microservices infrastructure can be logged. Development teams can access these logs as they arrive and, consequently, debug errors more easily.
– Alerts: Systems that sends real-time notifications to the technical team regarding the overload or mismanagement of infrastructure resources, or notifications about the actual API status. These alerts are sent via email or push notifications.
– Request for repetition: A second identical request can be raised to check that the performance response for the first log meets the predefined goal.
2. Akana Envision
Akana’s platform provides companies with the ability to reach conclusions based on information from their APIs and data about the performance of these interfaces, with the aim of managing and exchanging data among the APIs. Envision is a scalable and customizable tool. It can be used as the main platform to analyze complex data and how the APIs work, or integrated into an existing tool to avoid duplicates in the IT infrastructure.
With Envision, a group of developers can:
– Track product trends.
– Identify new business ideas and opportunities.
– Discover the best available APIs for each type of application, platform, channel or monetization outlook.
– Analyze whether or not the infrastructure responds to requests from devices and locations correctly, and whether or not it reacts to the type of requests correctly.
– Manage APIs. For example, troubleshooting.
Some of its main features include:
– Data lake: Storage of raw data for future use or analysis.
– Data enrichment with Map Reduce, R Analytics or fully customized plug-ins.
– Data import from external sources.
– Data export to external sources for analysis.
– Creation of custom dashboards.
3. CA App Synthetic Monitor
This tool allows you to monitor APIs and web services in the cloud. The platform simulates the complete workflow of an API and reproduces it from any of the measurement and monitoring stations in the CA App Synthetic Monitor. The tool aims to replicate the end user experience to determine the status and availability of every application and identify possible errors.
Its main features are as follows:
– Replicate transactions by actual users from 94 monitoring stations in six continents so as to provide real-time, minute-by-minute API performance control and measurement.
– Performance monitoring of the company’s APIs and third party APIs. Performance monitoring of web services, including users.
– Alerts to react to problems involving API performance as soon as possible. These alerts contain all the necessary information: a timestamp, the script name, the type of API error, etc. Alert notifications can be set up in the tool’s console and sent via email, SMS, XMPP/Jabber, MSN, RSS or SNMP, or sent to a webpage (API). There is a log of when these alerts are received.
– Creation of customer reports: Statistics by time, day, week, month and year regarding availability and response times. All reports can be downloaded as a PDF or Excel file or using the API and sent via email, either manually or automatically. Real-time views (also available in interactive flash format) can also be downloaded as PNG.
– Data availability is variable: 30 days for non-processed data, 48 hours for analysis data about the root cause, and 4 months for statistical data.
– Monitoring of APIs and web services in the cloud is compatible with any type of API: REST, SOAP, oAuth, JSON, XML, RSS, openID…
Configuration of dashboards from the CA App Synthetic Monitor’s console. The default dashboard includes historical data and the latest alerts. All this is real-time information. Aggregate script results can also be displayed in the monitoring dashboard.
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