Last Updated: September 21st, 2023
API Monitoring tools are primarily meant to assist you to evaluate the performance of your app and fix bad APIs. They determine how long a procedure requires to perform, how many times the app is getting executed, and the total time the application takes to complete the execution. Since we can’t keep an eye on our applications to check if everything is working fine all the time. We should monitor and identify before our application gets worse. The monitoring APIs inform the users of the possible errors, the errors, and the whereabouts.
What is an API? API is an Application Programming Interface used by programmers to create software.
Metrics of API
To expeditiously detect problems, we require information about our API activities. Multiple API analytics may be used to sort and filter the data of our API. I have compiled a metrics list below:
- Time: when the application has begun.
- Latency: How long it takes to succeed or fail the application.
- Size: request size or answer size. Often this is linked to latency.
- Endpoint: The application was made for an endpoint.
- Claims: the endpoint inputs.
- Environment: Environmental implementation details (i.e. test, production)
- Success: if the application failed or failed.
- HTTP Status Code: The HTTP standard status codes and network request is included.
- Location: from whence the request came.
I have selected some of the top open-source and commercial API monitoring tools and services currently available. We will immerse ourselves in all the nooks and corners from strengths and weaknesses to prices to assist in identifying suitability for your instance of usage.
API Monitoring Tools
1. Sematext
Sematext is a robust API monitoring tool that allows you to track important API measurements to enhance your API efficiency, functionality, and reliability. It has a sophisticated API notification system that you can adapt to function in various error- and metric-based circumstances. This enables you to monitor the alerts by double or triple checks before issuing a notification. This enables you to use Sematext. It eliminates fake positive elements in the process. As an additional advantage, you may schedule your warnings at certain times during the day.
Pros:
- Strong alert supporting both internal and external surveillance
- Flexible subscription pricing and an optional payment
- Well-constructed warning system with several triggers and smart warning fatigue characteristics
Cons:
- Missing feature: Filtering the context view
- Documentation missing for old agents
- Delay in data showcase
2. Uptrends
Uptrends offers various API monitoring services. Their product bundle encompasses actual user tracking, server surveillance, and browser surveillance. The Uptrends API monitoring software utilizes an intelligent multi-step method to verify the operation, functionality, and availability of APIs. They rely on a strong alerting system, which each time something fails, sends a message.
You can monitor your API from various locations around the world and use private inspection points to test your application and web services within your firewall. These private checkpoints might be virtual machines or real servers that you have on-site and can be used by Uptrends to monitor your intranet, online apps, and APIs.
Pros:
- Uptrend’s User interface is simple but effective
- Uses actual browsers instead of simulated website-testing browsers
- More than 200 API test sites are accessible worldwide.
- Extensive test time for discovery of functions
Cons:
- Auto-renewal if you no longer use the services
- Features of reporting might be simplified
3. Dotcom-Monitor
A website and Internet service cloud-based testing tool that incorporates REST and SOAP API availability evaluations. You may configure a multi-task monitor device with HTTP/S tasks on the Dotcom-Monitor platform. This allows you to monitor the uptime, efficiency, and correct answers of OAuth 2.0-based online APIs. Dotcom-Monitor agents can verify that data between an API and a Web application may be correctly transferred through the replication of one or more end-client requests and by monitoring a SOAP web service.
Pros:
- A large variety of support for APIs like REST, SOAP, JSON, etc.
- Alerting options include email, text messages, and push alerts, making almost any team communication system compatible.
- Provides webpage monitoring aimed at speeding up e-commerce websites
Cons:
- The service pricing is high compared to other APIs
- Only available as SaaS
- Inconsistency in server response time readings
4. Loggly
The SolarWinds Loggly Cloud Monitor enables you to measure the progress of your app and the whole activity of the system throughout the whole stack. The simple interface of Loggly helps you to rapidly identify and eradicate problems before they influence your business.
The dashboard can be completely customized but includes pre-built sections to monitor KPIs and use statistics for your services. With the graphical and time-series data, Loggly truly starts to shine in bigger, more complicated situations. You will see your most frequently used services, API failures over time, and approximately 12 or more use data in only a few clicks.
Pros:
- Powerful identification of anomalies during use
- Proactive alert templates guarantee significant problems during onboarding are not ignored.
- Free for individual users
- Dashboards with teams and tools for communication are designed perfectly.
Cons:
- Single Sign-on should be modernized.
- The volume pricing scheme is tricky
5. Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch gathers and transforms raw data into understandable, near-real-time measurements. These measurements offer a straightforward approach to monitor over time the use and results of the Amazon EC2 API. You may learn more about the performance of your web apps and find and solve a range of problems using this information. Alarms that monitor particular thresholds can also be established and notices sent or specified actions taken if the thresholds are reached. As far as prices are concerned, Amazon also kept them simple. No monthly or yearly lock-in is available. You select how much you need and simply pay as you use it.
Pros:
- It gives a lot of inspection of your cloud installations out of the box dashboard.
- Disk alarms, CPU thresholds, and all important elements for ec2 installations.
- Cost measure and charging of bill management advisor notifications.
- DNS alerts and key problems in solving any of our websites.
Cons:
- Improving visual graphs is possible.
- More exports of the data types.
- Easier steps to set up for first alarm data configuration.
6. Postman
It is one of the most popular REST API monitoring and testing tools accessible with more than 10 million Postman developers, and compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms. Because of its simple user interface and ease of usage, Postman is so popular. Postman is a simple, yet effective approach to monitoring applications and services in addition to functional API testing.
Postman provides everyone with API monitoring solutions and is entirely available under a free subscription. The free plan has some restrictions. When you achieve 200 runs in parallel on a single monitor, an upgrade will be required.
Pros:
- Free of charge
- The large community supporting more than 10 million users
- Alerts may be put up using a simple procedure
- Fits with popular programs like Slack, PagerDuty, and many more.
- Has a premium team version that begins at $12.00 for extra collaboration capabilities
Cons:
- It can be extremely technical and complex for beginners
- There are some automation features missing
- Limited capacity for reporting
I have listed out the API alternatives for everyone, whether it’s a basic service or a more complicated one from DevOps to engineers, product managers, or business owners. From our API monitoring tools guide, you can discover how to pick the one you want. Another friendly piece of advice is to look beyond APIs, adding to your website monitoring approach synthetic monitoring and actual user monitoring. Hope this article will help you to choose the right option. Happy monitoring!