One of the stealthy trends in business computing is the gradual rise in reliance on APIs. Almost every digital interaction involves an API being called to gather data or invoke some key action. You can’t play Words with Friends without APIs and WalMart cannot run its vendor-managed inventory without them either.
APIs (also known as Application Programming Interfaces) allow one software application to communicate with another. APIs have been around as long as software in one form or another. But as APIs have become publicly accessible over the internet, there has been an explosion of innovation. But an even larger impact may come from internal use of APIs, as Dan Jacobson, VP of Edge Engineering for Netflix, points out in this article: "How A Netflix Tech Innovation Can Unleash Creativity in Your Business”.
One impact of this trend is that a huge amount of commerce takes place through APIs. Companies ranging from AT&T to Google to Amazon process billions of API transactions per day. In addition, the smooth running of a huge amount of the computing we use to run our businesses flows through APIs.
Surprisingly, however, systems for monitoring complex collections of APIs have lagged compared to the kind of tools we have for other operational systems. Google Analytics can provide oceans of information about who is coming to your web site, what pages they are viewing, what errors are occurring. As APIs become more and more important, we are clearly going to need the same sort of information to determine if all the APIs you are using or providing are working properly.
John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb.com and a pioneer in understanding the importance of APIs, is attempting to fill that gap with a new company he has created called API Science. By providing API monitoring that provides detailed information about how fast your APIs are responding and determining whether the responses are correct, API Science wants to provide a clear answer to such questions as:
<) Are my APIs running correctly?
<) Are my returning the right results?
<) Does my team know about issues?
<) Do I do know problems before my customers do?
<) Do I know what went wrong so I can resolve the issue?
Musser is initially targeting publishers of APIs. Early customers seem to be warm to the service.
Jeff Phillips, Application Development Manager, Getty Images, said that "API Science monitoring lets us know when something is wrong before our customers start calling. The monitors are very easy to setup and we're able to create multiple-step monitors within minutes."
"We compared API monitoring services and API Science came out on top. They gave us the right combination of advanced tools and ease-of-use to ensure our APIs are up and performing at all times. API Science has become an essential part of our stack,” said Simon Guest, VP of Platform R&D at Concur / SAP.
My view, however, is that not only publishers but users of APIs will come to rely on API monitoring as key part of their operational infrastructure. When you have an application that uses 10 or 20 APIs, it cannot be a mystery when something goes wrong. You must know which APIs are working properly and which are not.
While all sorts of monitoring tools can provide part of the picture about what is happening with an API, API Science is one of a handful of tools that is focused solely on understanding APIs. Other API monitoring tools include Runscope and APImetrics.
Musser feels that API Science leads this space because of their ease-of-use combined with advanced features like scriptable multi-step monitoring, deep set of data validation and alerting capabilities, along with a feature-rich API of their own. Customers find they can get started quickly and as their needs grow the product has the depth and feature set to support those more complex scenarios.
“As APIs become mission-critical for more and more companies, the teams supporting those APIs must be able to know what’s happening,” said Musser, “Our service helps those responsible for publishing or using APIs sleep well at night because they know those APIs are performing as promised.”
My recommendation for CIOs, CTOs, and those who run tech departments is that it is time to survey the operational risk your use of APIs entails and make sure you use some sort of monitoring to find problems as soon as they occur.
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