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API Monitoring and Analytics: Do you need them?

Choose the best API Monitoring and Analytics tool to scan your uptime and performance and use these data & metrics to detect any problems in advance.

Getting the advantage of APIs for service providers is quite popular, but how to keep the ball rolling? Using API Monitoring and Analytics tools is the next step just after you decide to use an API. That’s how you decide whether it boosts your business – if yes – and how.

As well as the convenience APIs provide in your data transactions, they also acquire a great amount of additional data. They facilitate your operations and improve the relationship with your customers in terms of service satisfaction. Therefore, in order to be able to monitor your APIs to keep things running smoothly, it’s very important to use API monitoring tools – which can serve different points of perception for your team of coders, marketers, business analysts and so on.

What are the benefits of using API Monitoring & Analytics tools?

API Monitoring concept suggests using some tools to track certain metrics such as your APIs performance, speed and function, or some other metrics of your customers and products regarding their engagement, retention and conversion.

API Analytics tools offer tracking the health, performance and usage of your APIs. It is highly important in your future business innovations and for responding operation’s and customer’s needs. Furthermore, it increases your control on the actions of third-party API providers. Here are two main ways of API monitoring:

API analytics

Synthetic vs. Real User Monitoring

In synthetic monitoring, the API monitoring tool uses artificial requests. In other words, it functions by generating a synthetic client using generated data or past transactions. This approach is also known as “active monitoring” since it actively uses the API while monitoring.

The advantage of synthetic monitoring is that it finds certain problems before your clients face them. Furthermore, it gathers data 24/7 as long as the monitoring client is online. One of the disadvantages, on the other hand, is that since synthetic monitoring depends on generated/predicted or the past data, your real clients and their transactions are not monitored in real-time. Additionally, it would be costly and, in some cases, impossible to generate every single transaction possible of your clients.

In Real User Monitoring (RUM) the current transactions of real customers are monitored in real-time. This approach is also called “passive monitoring” because your API’s active participation is not required, meaning it doesn’t run as many times as in the real scenarios. It allows you to keep up with your customers and the problems they have.

Choose

Which monitoring approach should I use?

Since synthetic and real user monitoring tools provide particular benefits you can’t just ignore, a combination of both would be your best interest.

Which API Monitoring tool to choose?

There are certain factors that you should consider. Primarily, the tool should be user-friendly so that you understand and use every single function it offers. It should provide significant data and visual outputs for your future decisions.

Choice

Availability of reusing particular scripts will also prevent you repeating the same tasks and increase the efficiency of your monitoring. Moreover, having a variety of options when scheduling your API monitoring is quite beneficial since your user experience may change in time.

Another important aspect is whether the API monitoring tool investigates assertions and verifies the data. This provides, besides speed and availability check, a monitoring of functional accuracy. Next thing to consider is whether the tool is adaptable to further systems of yours. By this means, it will provide a flexible solution that won’t have a significant negative impact when you change your operations.

Keep in mind that an API monitoring tool should provide alerts when something is wrong with your service. It is important to take immediate actions against certain problems caused by APIs.

Last Words

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