It’s important to keep an eye on the condition and performance of your APIs, and to know if there are any problems with them, before they affect your clients or customers. That’s why API monitoring is needed to make sure it keeps running smoothly. Check out what API monitoring is, how it works, and why it’s important below. 

What is API Monitoring?

API monitoring is an automated process to observe the behavior of HTTP APIs running in various environments and notify the engineering team as soon as the monitoring system identifies anything abnormal with the API. Types of API monitoring include availability, performance, and functional correctness. 

How API Monitoring Works

Here are 5 ways to effectively monitor API performance:

1. API Traffic Management

Traffic management helps companies keep their services available while preventing denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. This requirement may entail restricting access to the API, such as geographic location. Companies can also charge for their services based on frequency of requests, execution time, or data. 

Monitoring APIs allows enterprises to enforce the above restrictions and configure settings from a central API monitoring dashboard. Some API monitoring tools offer API lifecycle management features, which allow enterprise API management teams to shape traffic based on criteria such as API speed limits, size limits, access control quotas, and policies. 

By properly managing API traffic management, it makes the API more effective in delivering the desired results, including in terms of monetization. API monitoring tools also exist that offer legacy application handling by shaping traffic to provide an effective and consistent facade, with just a few clicks. 

2. Security and Governance

The risk of cybercriminals exploiting vulnerabilities is increasing as more companies open up their networks to the outside world. API users bear the risk of the APIs they use and the APIs that call them. API monitoring includes authenticating API calls and identifying anomalies that could indicate a security breach in real-time. 

Secure APIs are essential for building flexible and scalable operations with multiple teams in different geographies. API monitoring tools offer features that can help users focus on executing business logic rather than implementing it. 

Governance is also part of keeping APIs secure. It includes policies, practices, regulations, and standards. API monitoring tools ensure that users of their services are better able to do the right thing, according to the rules. By doing so, it allows the user company to focus on rapid API development that will help scale the company’s operations. 

It would be best to choose an API monitoring tool that simplifies governance without the need to redesign the system. For companies that use multiple clouds, be sure to choose a monitoring tool that can handle omnichannel, so that all platforms can be managed in one platform, making it easier to manage security. 

3. Audit

API monitoring is essential to prevent attacks on corporate information systems. An organized and repeatable process is also needed to troubleshoot problems, which requires a server to record audit data. This data is a valuable resource in the event of an incident, as is an easy-to-use API monitoring dashboard. Audit trails also help in retiring obsolete APIs. 

Companies that have audit concerns can opt for API monitoring tools that offer solutions to delegate autonomy and access rights to API management team members and other stakeholders, while still maintaining centralized control for their systems. 

4. Gateway

API gateways receive all API requests from clients that are routed to the appropriate microservices based on the requested routing and composition. This process often requires the gateway to contact multiple microservices and collect responses. Gateways also translate between internal protocols and web-based ones. 

5. Lifetime Management

The lifetime of an API consists of several chronological stages, which means that one phase is completed before the next phase begins. However, the API-first approach allows the management team to work on these lifetime phases in parallel. 

For example, the development team can build the API, while the DevOps team secures the API gateway. These phases are phased, but can still overlap. A reliable API monitoring tool is able to manage all these phases efficiently. It does this by empowering development, product, and platform teams to securely improve API work. 

Why API Monitoring is Important

API monitoring is essential for understanding API conditions and performance. By implementing API uptime monitoring and comprehensive API performance monitoring, companies can ensure their networks remain reliable and perform well. 

API monitoring tools can identify and respond to any issues faster. That way, the management team will move to optimize performance and product evolution based on how consumers use the API. 

Here are some reasons why monitoring APIs is so important:

1. Ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) 2.

Getting API monitoring tools to work as intended is key to providing high-quality service. A proactive monitoring strategy means any performance degradation can be quickly identified and addressed. 

2. Risk Mitigation

API management monitoring tools greatly assist companies in mitigating their risks. From buggy updates that affect performance to reputational damage associated with frequent slowdowns. 

There are many risks when it comes to providing APIs to customers. This is where APIs are important to avoid most of those risks, by detecting issues early through thorough API monitoring. 

3. Save Costs

The earlier the company finds the problem, the faster the company will fix the problem. Problems that are allowed to drag on will cost much more to resolve. Therefore, a quality API monitoring tool can help keep costs to a minimum. 

4. Maintain Company Reputation

Of course all companies want their products or services to be known. But no company wants to be known for providing slow and unreliable APIs. API monitoring tools can improve a company’s reputation for providing responsive APIs. API performance needs to be maintained to maintain the company’s reputation and increase customer loyalty. Make sure to use a trusted API monitoring solution like Netmonk, so that the performance remains good. Its services have been used by various large companies in Indonesia, just visit the Netmonk website for more information about its products!