What Are These Monitoring Tools?

In addition to making it easier for us to track our systems, applications and microservices, monitoring tools can be used in many industries and professions. Checking the availability of our API at any time is as important to us as tracking the weather forecast is for a farmer.

 

Since we cannot monitor our vehicles at any time to see if there are any problems, we need some tools to do this for us. Tracking tools alert us to users when something goes wrong, why and where they might have gone wrong. In this way, it allows us to continue our lives without having to worry about whether the tools are broken at any moment.

 

In this article, we'll take a look at what an API monitor should do, then discuss when tools should be implemented and metrics that should be searched for in tools. Next, we'll introduce some of the best API monitoring tools available.

 

API Monitoring Example

It would be good to examine an ideal example of how an API monitoring tool should work. After initially deploying an API with API monitoring, HTTP status codes etc. Tests are created with the monitoring tool to check. The API provides you with helpful analysis and easy-to-use graphs, making it easy to find bottlenecks, unusual delays, or queuing requests.

 

After setting the alerts, you will be notified if there is a path in the API that fails Also, you integrate the tool into your CI / CD pipeline so you don't create errors in production. Reports allow you to discover where, when, how and why the route created failed.

This example includes most of the important factors you want from your tracking tool:

- Testing

- Analytics / Graphics

- Warnings

- Integrations

 

When to Choose an API Monitoring Tool?

Although the example above looks typical, it may not always be the best way to develop and deploy an API. Generally, with a single tool, you will have features that have become the core features of many monitoring products, such as monitoring and testing. Therefore, instead of creating the API and then setting up the monitoring, setting up the API monitoring and testing while developing the API can help in many ways. We can list some of them as follows:

 

- Different environments

- Ensuring a clean CI/CD pipeline

- Shipping good software

In this way, after a difficult development phase, the distribution, which is the biggest need of the team, can be done without any problems.

 

API Metrics

It is very important that we have information about the effectiveness of our API in order to detect problems efficiently and effectively. There are several API analytics that will allow our API to collect and analyze data while sorting and filtering its data. Below I have created a list of metrics:

Time: When the request was initiated.

Latency: How long it took the request to succeed or fail.

Size: The size of the request or response. This is often correlated with latency.

Endpoint: The endpoint the request was for.

Arguments: The inputs to the endpoint.

Environment: The execution details for the environment (i.e staging, production)

Success: Whether the request failed or did not.

HTTP Status Code: The network code for the request. This will be one of the standard HTTP status codes.

Location: Where the request originated from.

The collection of this data allows us to check the effectiveness of the API. We don't have to wait for a mistake in our jobs to use the tool. We can target endpoints in terms of performance, quickly find unfulfilled customer requests, and test different configurations in new environments.

Now that we're talking about what monitoring is, key factors for API tracking, and API metrics, it's time to take a look at some of the best API monitoring tools available.

 

Best API Monitoring Tools

1.Finage

Finage has more than 32.000+ symbols in real-time. We bring together everything that’s required to build financial applications that need Real-Time stock, forex and cryptocurrency data via APIs and WebSocket.

- US Stock Market

You can reach more than 25.000+ U.S. stock data via Finage's Real-Time WebSocket and APIs. You can also use the 15-year Historical Data API for the U.S stocks as well.

- Forex

Finage offers more than 1300+ currencies in real-time & Historical Data API. Forex data all in one place, so you can access our full selection of data.

- Cryptocurrencies

We offer you more than 1500+ cryptocurrencies via API and WebSocket. Finage has the most popular cryptocurrencies as Real-time.

 

 

Why Finage

A technology first approach to finance and market data feeds.

- APIs & Web Sockets

Put your key in, integrate with detailed documents, Connect & Start with one click and you're ready to receive tailored secure real-time data with super low latency over TCP protocols.

- Finage Widget Collection

Visuality is the best way to demonstrate complex data for easy understanding. Select custom widgets with different color schemes to best fit best on your platform. Available across most of popular platforms.

- Developer Friendly

Our flexible platform works with all the tools you use every day so you can integrate it with your own methods and get started right away. You can run it in C++, Go, .Net, Node.JS, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby and HTML along with sample code and a few other features.

- Wide Data Coverage

There are dozens of data resources you can use on your platform. Financial statements, Ownership, Analyst’s Estimates, Stock API, Forex & Crypto API, News Sentiments, Earning Call Transcripts, Merger and Acquisitions and more are included in your request.

 

1. RapidAPI

RapidAPI allows users to monitor and manage API performance in the following two ways:

- Testing

- Teams

Conversely, it is also possible to combine and use the two products in a complete corporate approach.

 

RapidAPI Test

This API testing tool provides developers or QA engineers with access to create and manage comprehensive API tests, while meeting users' monitoring needs with a functional and easy-to-use interface.

 

With RapidAPI, you can quickly create test cases from your existing API, while also allowing you to schedule and run tests from different locations around the world at intervals. With these features, it makes it easier for you to manage differences for users depending on location and request size.

 

2. Postman

Postman gets things done by offering multiple options for running and monitoring tests on APIs. While you can run API requests to test locally with Newman or Collection Runner, most customers are probably more interested in using Postman monitors. This runs the API collection in Postman's cloud.

 

Having access to the Postman cloud allows you to run collections in the cloud, view and schedule API requests per collection. You can then filter the results and view graphs showing the response time for each test.

Also, Postman Monitoring can be integrated with applications like:

- Github

- PagerDuty

- HipChat

- Postman API

In conclusion, with Postman you can:

- Run collections in the cloud

- View the results

- Integrate with other monitoring tools.

 

3. Uptrends

Uptrends is a provider of various services on product packages, real user monitoring, server monitoring and website browser monitoring. Below, we will briefly talk about Uptrend's API monitoring service.

It serves its applications by providing an API client where a user can create API requests, data and scenarios related to their APIs.

This includes:

- Titles

- Variables

- Claims

Uptrends is aimed at helping organizations with their functional testing needs and enables their customers to work in the cloud.

Uptrends enables fast switching between dashboards, tracking details, alerts, browser monitors, and API monitors with an easy-to-navigate, updated interface.

 

Conclusion

In this article, we have tried introduced how an API monitoring tool should work. Then, we talked about when is the right time to start looking for integrating a tool. Next, we outlined the most important metrics and analytics that a tool should collect for analysis and error detection. Finally, we went through a list of the best API monitoring tools available.