What is API monitoring?

Modern applications often use a web of services to meet their functional and non-functional goals, and we need continuous, automated monitoring of this complex system to meet business service-level agreements (SLAs). Among other things, APIs between services provide an excellent vantage point to observe any anomalies on time. For large systems, catching issues early has a lot of value in terms of customer satisfaction and minimizing the operational cost of the service.

If an API has a slow response, we must first identify the problem before we can fix it. The identification of the problem is possible by continuous monitoring of the API. API monitoring is the process of analyzing overall API performance to identify problems that can impact developers and users of the API. It analyzes the availability and on-time response of all the connected resources to API calls.

Why is API monitoring required?

APIs are the building blocks of most digital applications because their businesses' transactions and flow depend on them. It’s impossible to manually monitor services at all times. Continuous API monitoring enables us to check that everything is working properly around the clock and helps us identify the root of any problem. The following illustration shows the impact of successful API responses and failed API responses.

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