Many of you are API Owners/Product Managers, and know how to design, create, and test effective APIs. And if you're exposing them through a portal to developers, you've almost certainly created great documentation (the best motivator in the world - if you don't, you get hounded by developers on "why does it do this when I do that" types of questions). But once your APIs are in the wild, is designing and testing APIs enough? What really happens when no one is watching? What happens when an API fails?
First, the API fails, then the applications relying on the API fails which impacts user experience. Search for “API outage” on twitter and you’ll see a stream of discussions happening every day from small to large organizations that are suffering from an API outage – people will be vocal when the experience doesn’t meet their expectations. Next, your DevOps team will scramble to find root cause and eventually isolate the issue to the API, but by then the damage has been done. Your brand reputation may be tarnished and it can directly impact your revenue.
Most applications now have hundreds of APIs making remediation time consuming. When even one API is down, so is your business.
I would recommend that you catch API failures before your customers do. You should know when 3rd party APIs go down and how they affect app performance, and ensure SLAs are being met. And you definitely should ensure that APIs are returning the right data.
API monitoring is the most effective way to address this. I'd like to invite you to an upcoming webcast, One bad API(L) Can Ruin the Entire User Experience, taking place September 26th at 9am (PST). Brian Whitmarsh, Sr. Director, Product Management for CA Technologies Agile Operations Business Unit, will be discussing API monitoring in depth, and showcase Runscope, an API monitoring solution that's tightly integrated with CA API Management.