What is the Difference between API Observability and API Monitoring
What’s their importance for building successful and scalable APIs and how they’re being used inside LinkApi
The API market is experiencing a fast growth rate in the past years. Every piece of software built today either uses an API or is an API. They have become an essential element in today’s digital economy and along with that the need to understand precisely how to observe them grow accordingly.
In this article, we’ll talk about the definition of API monitoring and observability as well as the difference between them, their importance for building successful and scalable APIs and how they’re being used inside LinkApi.
What are API Monitoring and Observability?
For starters, the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) book states:
Monitoring is Collecting, processing, aggregating, and displaying real-time quantitative data about a system, such as query counts and types, error counts and types, processing times, and server lifetimes.
Following this definition, both API monitoring and observability are ways of monitoring that are used to monitor application program interfaces (APIs) to gain insight into their availability, performance, and proper functionality. They allow you to see how your APIs are performing, how they are being used, and how they are driving business value.
They may appear to be different names to say the same thing, however, the two of them have different ways of giving you insight of your API, and that’s what we’re going to see now.
API Monitoring
Starting with the tradition way of monitoring APIs, also know as API Monitoring. API monitoring is a way of monitoring that allow teams to watch and understand the state of their APIs, or even systems depending on where it’s being. In other words, monitoring is based on gathering predefined sets of metrics or logs.
While the traditional API monitoring allows you to check for your API status, errors and timeouts, it’s also intrinsically limited for being a black-box form of monitoring.
Black-box monitoring
Black-box monitoring is a form of monitoring made by testing externally visible behavior as a user would see it. In other words, it’s not that much different from having to guess which parts of your API may cause problems as it relies on making assumptions about what can be broken before it happens.
The downside of this is that you have to manually write the checks you need ahead of time and in the end of the day your API monitoring will only be able to check on the traffic that your tests generates, not an actual customer API traffic.
API Observability
On the other hand, API observability is all about making our API observable rather than only being able to debug what we’d thought to log or monitor in advance. Unlike traditional monitoring, API observability is a form of white-box monitoring.
White-box monitoring
The idea of a white-box invokes a feeling of transparency, it is a form of monitoring based on metrics exposed by the internals of the system, so it requires an agent or SDK, such as LinkApi, to passively log API traffic to an observability service in order to allows teams to actively debug their system.
Observability is based on exploring properties and patterns not defined in advance, the core of observability breaks down into three key areas: structured logs, metrics, and traces.
To give you a better explanation of those pillars, we’ll see how they’re used inside LinkApi monitoring system.
Structured Logs
Structured logs give your API the ability to inspect calls in real-time for debugging and auditing. API logs show you the exact calls in an instant in time. Because an API is by definition structured unlike traditional logging, API logs can also be used for generating aggregations and metrics while maintaining context.
LinkApi structure logs you have the flexibility to configure the data you want to log, this data may or not be emitted by each process and may contain a mixture of information, ranging from records of individual user queries to debugging information generically associated with our service.
Metrics
The objective of metrics is to aggregate-type data about the performance of services, API metrics enable you to monitor both engineering and business KPIs such as performance and customer usage.
Inside LinkApi, metrics allow you to have each request’s detailed logs, monitoring access, data traffic, performance and more. With that you can observe which resources of your API are most used, find information about errors and allow you to prevent them from happening.
Traces
And finally, traces allow individual execution flows to be traced through the system, including timing and dependency details.
The tracing system in LinkAPI platform, together with the endpoints details inside metrics, make it easy to understand how long different services take to respond and where timing errors can occur, enabling you to further explore which logs to look at for a particular session or related set of API calls.
Closing thoughts
Nowadays APIs are everywhere, the API market doesn’t stop growing and neither does its importance inside the software ecosystem, however, API monitoring can only do so much for you. If your team needs to answer arbitrary questions required for data-driven engineering and business teams, consider using an API observability approach to your API or hiring an platform who can do that for you, such as LinkApi.
