The Importance of API Monitoring
What’s the one thing that you’ve always dreamt of buying but you’ve always told yourself that it just wasn’t practical? Maybe it’s a Porsche. Perhaps it’s a 60 inch TV. Or it might just be that expensive piece of cake in the bakery window that taunts you every day as you walk home from work. Whatever it is, imagine that you finally decide to splurge. Today’s the day to treat yourself. You walk into the shop feeling like a million bucks. You can tell that everyone around you is jealous. You can’t stop smiling as you tell the shop assistant, “This one, please.” As you hand over your credit card you daydream about how great it’s going to feel to bring your treasure home. But all of a sudden, your blissful thoughts are interrupted. The cashier is telling you that your card has been denied. Your bank didn’t bother to tell you that it wouldn’t be working today. This is how your customers feel when your API doesn’t work.
Now imagine that you’ve invested a lot of money and effort into building the perfect app. You’ve run an expensive promotional campaign and users are excited to download it. Now it’s all about to be paid off. Anyone familiar with creating apps knows that it’s not easy. You need a great idea, the funds to develop and market it, the endurance to make it through the painful amount of required testing to be sure that it’s stable, and the patience to wait for it to do well. It would be silly to let all of your hard work go to waste and lose a customer due to API failure.
Most mobile apps, with the exception of those that operate offline, rely heavily on APIs. Even if you’ve tested yours back and forth before releasing it to the market, sometimes things still go wrong. Often these failures are caused by problems with the API. APIs tend to be unavailable, return unsupported data formats and so on. If that happens, you, the app owner or developer, must be the first to know that your API is in trouble. Otherwise you could wind up with disgruntled customers, angry reviews that bring down your ratings and make it much more expensive to bring in new downloads, or the guilt of knowing that someone ate dog while they were traveling because your translation app wouldn’t work.
Apps are serious business these days. People count on them to get to work, to have their groceries delivered, and to find rides home when they’re too hammered to navigate public transportation. You must be sure that your app is working — or to be more specific, that its API is working.
