Up-scaling your services or APIs for Health means multiplying your users and with them the traffic you receive on your servers. In this scenario, the ability to know what is happening is even more important, in order to make the right decisions and maintain the quality of the service. In this post we tell you how Nubentos easily monitors the activity of your APIs for Health, and puts this information in your inbox.

A bit of History

In year 2000, the dissertation written by Roy Fielding, formalised the arrival of the APIs to the world of software architecture. Since then, APIs have become one of the main tools used to facilitate the exchange of information between systems in virtually all industries. The world of Health has not been oblivious to this development and, especially during the last years, its development has been vertiginous.

Within this dizzying development, what has come to be called “the life cycle of the APIs” has been defined. Within this life cycle, different phases are typically defined and differentiated:

API Design

In this phase, the necessary mappings are carried out between the resources and the internal operations that are to be published through the API and which must be accessible through its specific methods and parameters.

API Development

This phase focuses on the implementation of the API as specified in the design phase. In this phase, it is especially important to use tools and frameworks that facilitate and accelerate the development process.

API Testing

Since the success of the publication of an API will be closely related to its reliability, it is very important that the API be tested exhaustively to detect possible problems or errors.

API Deployment

The ultimate goal of developing an API is to respond to a use case of a final consumer (whether internal or external). Therefore, the API must be deployed in a secure environment that facilitates its discovery and consumption.

API Deprecation

Once the API has ceased to be useful, it is deprecated, ceasing to be supported and, therefore, an alternative to current consumers must be provided.

Monitoring your APIs for Health

As you can see, the life cycle of APIs is generally thought of from a technical perspective, but with this approach, a key element for the development of the API strategy of any company is missing: the APIs monitoring.

With this monitoring, we are referring not only to the possibility of detecting possible incidents or technical problems that may arise with our APIs, but also to be able to evaluate the consumption that our users are making of our APIs in order to fine-tune our management decisions (throttling, prices, etc.).

It is here, where relying on an API Marketplace as Nubentos is a key success factor for the features and monitoring capabilities offered, which simplify and facilitate the constant measurement and evaluation of the activity of your Health APIs.

Below are some of the most important monitoring features offered in Nubentos.

Use of your APIs for Health

Assessing the use of an API is a key factor in making sound management decisions (limit of invocations by API – throttling, price, etc.). We would be talking here about metrics such as:

• Number of subscribers per API
• Uses per accessed resource
• Uses per invocation destination
• Comparisons of use between different APIs
• Uses per application
• Uses per user (within the same application)
• Uses by geolocation
• Throttling: Invocations rejected for having reached the defined limit (either globally or by application)
• Etc.

Some examples:

 

 

Quality of service

In addition to the use, it is important to monitor that our API complies with the pre-set quality standards. Among the parameters to be evaluated to ensure this compliance we would have:

• Latency
• Invocations erroneous (total and per application)
• Availability

 

 

 

Alerts when monitoring your APIs for Health

These are just some of the metrics that can be monitored quickly and easily using the Nubentos API Marketplace.

But there is still more, because Nubentos also offers the possibility of activating the automatic sending of Alerts to a list of email addresses. In this way, the platform itself can warn you in a preventive manner when certain thresholds of use are crossed and when it detects certain variations in the use of your APIs.

Specifically, the types of alerts available are:

• Unusual response
• time Unusual backend time Unusual
• number of requests
• Unusual access to resource
• Access from an unknown IP
• Unusual access token renewal
• Extra requests
• Unusual use of an API
• Availability

And all of these active and preventive monitoring features available with Nubentos, are free.

To learn more, contact us at http://nubentos.com/en/contact/