API Monitoring is a process that monitors the activity, output, and performance of an API based on Environment, Time, regions, etc. API monitoring plays a significant role in identifying and addressing issues related to API functionality and security before they impact partners or end-users of that API.
Unlike API testing, which mainly focuses on validating functionalities in the development phase, API monitoring is focused on detecting and resolving issues in a live production environment. By closely monitoring APIs, we can minimize downtime, prevent errors, optimize performance, and enhance the overall reliability of the applications.
Table of Content
Key Metrics for monitoring APIs:
Some of the popular key metrics for monitoring APIs are-
- Traffic Volume– The traffic volume of the API request over time tells us about the usage patterns and also aware us of the spikes or drops in traffic. Sudden traffic increases may imbalance system resources, leading to performance issues, while drops in traffic indicate service failures.
- Errors– Errors tell about the performance of API. If we are getting lots of errors then we need to work on that API to improve performance.
- Endpoint Availability– It ensures API is consistently available. Downtime in critical endpoints can significantly impact users and all types of integrations dependent on those endpoints
Why use Postman for API monitoring?
There can be multiple parameters like response time, uptime, load time, availability, etc.. in API monitoring that can be judged using Postman Monitors. It can be mainly used to schedule API requests at some predefined time interval to measure its performance and gather data that is returned by the API.
After making our API we not only need the performance of API on certain time intervals but we also need the performance of API based on certain environments, based on different regions of the world, etc… All these performance measurements are available in the Postman Monitor. These are some of the parameters on which API is monitored on Postman-
- Based on Environment
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Based on time
- By Minute Timer
- By Hour Timer
- By Week Timer
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Based on regions
- By Automatically Selecting the Region
- By Manually Selecting Region
- Based on the request Timeout
- Based on the delay between requests
And because of these, we use Postman for API Monitoring
Why is API monitoring crucial in an API-first world?
API Monitoring is crucial in an API-first world because of the increase in the demand of API’s. Companies started shifting from monolithic to microservice architecture. In monolithic architecture all the features are in one place but in microservice architecture, we have different servers for different features. Now to interact between those servers we need APIs and if any one API stops working then we will not be able to run the entire backend because every microservice is dependent on other microservices. So if one microservice API does not work then it will surely affect others.
Apart from that companies usually outsource most services because creating many services from scratch will cost a lot of energy, effort, and money. For example, if any company needs a payment gateway then making an entire new payment gateway for itself is a bit tedious work. So its best alternative is to integrate different available payment gateway via APIs. So for accessing third-party services we also need an API. If somehow any API will not work then it will surely impact our overall performance. So it is very important to continuously monitor APIs.
What are the primary use cases for API monitoring?
- Less Number of Errors or Not,- If there are less number of errors then only on certain conditions does API fail but if there is a large number of errors then it needs immediate attention.
- API returns within time or not– If the API is returning requests after the fixed time then we should take serious action.
- Scan API for Vulnerability– During API Monitoring we should also monitor our API for all types of vulnerability.
- Be aware of third-party issuesNot- If we are not able to figure out the problem by ourselves then there must be an issue at the provider end in third-party APIs. So we should be aware of that.
What are some API monitoring best practices?
- If there are sudden spikes in response time, and latency time then supporting infrastructure like a database should also be monitored
- After monitoring, match it with previously monitored data to find the difference to get an idea that we are improving or not
- Analyze traffic patterns to get a better idea of when you have maximum and when you have minimum traffic
- After monitoring you should also analyze the resource utilized during the API call. By doing this you can get an idea that which resource is very important for our API to be in working condition
Benefits of API Monitoring-
- Faster Issue Identification– It helps us to find issues as early as possible by checking that API against various parameters
- Ensures Reliability– It helps in finding all the bugs and human errors as early as possible and thus it makes the overall API output reliable
- Improve Performance– It finds all the issues that are present in the API and by solving those issues we can easily improve our API performance
- Business Growth– It alerts us about any type of potential downtime. So that we can easily work on that and save our business from loss that will eventually lead to business growth
- Scalable– It will help in making a scalable system because we can find problems at each step in the process of scaling
Features available in Postman Monitor
- Monitor Name: It will help in giving a specific name to the monitor
- Collections: It helps to choose collections on which we will perform monitoring.
- Environment: It helps in creating different environments on which we want to test and Monitor our API.
- Data File: This is optional and it provides support in uploading any JSON or CSV file up to, 1 MB.
- Timer: In this three different types of timers are available and those are Minute Timer, Hour Timer, and Week Timer. Minute Timer is only available for paid plans. But more often we choose a week timer. By using that timer we can decide at which time we want our API test to be performed
- Set Request Timeout– It allows us to set a timeout means if our API is unable to respond within the stipulated time then we will move forward to do something else
- Set Delay between requests– This delay means there will be some time difference between two calls and that is here mentioned by the delay.
- Follow Redirects– It will allow to follow any redirection done by the API
- Enable SSL Validation– After enabling this, API will require SSL validation.