API Monitoring refers to the practice of monitoring Application Programming Interfaces, most commonly in production, to gain visibility into performance, availability, and functional correctness. In this article, we will discuss the Best API Monitoring Tool.
In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of subroutine definitions, communication protocols, and tools for building software. In general terms, it is a set of clearly defined methods of communication among various components. A good API makes it easier to develop a computer program by providing all the building blocks, which are then put together by the programmer.
An API monitoring solution can give you visibility into the performance of third-party and partner APIs (such as those of AWS, credit card providers, and others) in addition to those you manage. This way, you'll not only be able to hold partners accountable but also know who to contact should any issues arise.
Below are the top 12 Best API Monitoring Tools:
1. Checkly
Checkly claims to be a state-of-the-art monitoring and testing solution that caught a lot of attention, especially in the JavaScript community with customers such as Vercel and Humio. You can monitor web APIs, as well as site transactions, and flows in a real browser. The single dashboard shows you everything you need to know about the correctness and performance of your app at any time.
The powerful REST API that lets you orchestrate and automate your checks, for example, with Terraform. It also enables users to set up fine-grained alerting in combination with Opsgenie, Pagerduty, or Slack. All-in-all a great solution I see most interesting for modern DevOps teams.
2. Better Uptime
Better Uptime is a modern monitoring service that combines API, ping and uptime monitoring, incident management, and status pages into a single beautifully designed product.
The setup takes 3 minutes. After that, you get a call, email, or Slack alert, whenever your API endpoint doesn’t work correctly. The main features are:
API, Ping, HTTP(s), SSL & TLD expiration, Cron jobs checks
Unlimited phone call alerts
Easy on-call scheduling
Screenshots & error logs of incidents
Slack, Teams, Heroku, AWS, and 100+ other integrations
3. Amazon CloudWatch
If you have infrastructure on AWS, CloudWatch cannot be recommended enough. Besides application monitoring, CloudWatch also has infrastructure monitoring, helping your DevOps team sleep peacefully at night.
As per the official description, CloudWatch offers:
Application monitoring
System-wide visibility
Resource optimization
Unified operational health
So, as long as you have an AWS-only deployment, CloudWatch will be able to monitor your application uptime, performance, resource usage, network bandwidth, disk/CPU usage, and so on, providing a robust solution to all sorts of monitoring.
Perhaps the most significant advantage of CloudWatch is that you virtually don’t need to set anything up. The AWS services generate relevant logs and share them directly with CloudWatch, which ends up on a neat and simple-to-understand dashboard.
4. Rigor
If you live by performance metrics and put the customer experience above everything else, Rigor is worth a look. The name is well-chosen, as you can get as rigorous with the tool as you want. One useful feature of Rigor is functional testing. If you’re not into the testing lingo, don’t worry; functional testing refers to the act of testing the entire flow of a transaction, and not just focusing on a single endpoint.
In some ways, functional testing is more important than unit testing because it implicitly covers unit testing and provides customer experience prediction directly.
5. Sematext
Sematext is now quite well-known among DevOps teams thanks to their suite of monitoring tools designed to ensure end-to-end visibility into applications and websites. API monitoring is a part of their synthetic monitoring service, Sematext Synthetics.
Sematext offers an advanced API monitoring notification system that you can customize to work on several different conditions based on errors and metrics. That way, you can set up the tool to do a double or triple check before sending an alert. You basically eliminate false positives in the process and get more accurate alerts and avoid alert fatigue.
6. Assertible
Assertible brands itself as the easiest API monitoring tool and is primarily geared towards Testing and QA teams. So if you think you don’t have the in-house technical competence to wrestle with JSON, XML, and writing code, Assertible is worth a look.
The USP of Assertible is engaging and straightforward: Your QA and Testing teams can create tests and verify/monitor them using the Assertible interface. It integrates perfectly with GitHub, so your knowledge base stays with you, besides working seamlessly with Slack.
The full-circle integration and review functionality allows virtually anyone in your team (even project managers) to create tests and review performance metrics.
Okay, the situation in the screenshot above might seem a bit unrealistic (one-minute issue-resolution), but it’s possible when feedback is clear and immediate. The zero absence of coding required means that tests can be created as quickly as your QA teams can type, and once done, can be applied over and over again. This is in stark contrast to the practice of “manual testing” followed at most companies, where a single tester can take several days to cover the app, and yet miss out on more excellent details simply due to oversight or exertion.
7. AppDynamics
Now a part of Cisco, AppDynamics has been in the web application monitoring game for a long time and is quite well-known. At present, AppDynamics is a suite of tools to solve a broad range of performance and monitoring requirements of a modern SaaS team.
As far as pure API/microservice monitoring goes, the suite offers Microservice IQ. With this service, you can monitor and analyze a microservice cluster of virtually any scale, preserving the history and letting you correlate it with changes in the cluster. At any rate, this at least allows you to simulate the impact of adding/removing nodes from the cluster.
8. APImetrics
With full end-to-end coverage, APImetrics’s API monitoring does a fantastic job of letting you know of issues even before they’re reported by your users. You can monitor from over 80 different locations and get real-time alerts straight to your preferred tool, which includes email, Slack, Pager Duty, and other similar ones.
Other than that, it lets you look through the API functioning, whether it’s DNS lookup or processing times of the server in order to confirm that transactions are completed as they should be. This is a pretty handy feature, and given that APImetrics is super simple to set up in general, makes things even better.
This service can handle any type of API request, set conditions, define assertions and give you insights into various areas, including connectivity issues.
9. BlazeMeter
When it comes to end-to-end testing and monitoring of applications, BlazeMeter is the behemoth that eats everything else for lunch. At the same time, though, it’s not for the faint of heart or those looking for a simple API monitoring solution that doesn’t demand much.
BlazeMeter is something you get married to, and then it keeps paying off over the lifetime of the app.
The biggest plus point of BlazeMeter is integration with Apache JMeter, arguably the default performance measurement tool for large web applications. Yes, with BlazeMeter, you are free to choose open-source testing frameworks and analyze them easily via simple dashboards.
10. Moesif
Moesif is a highly user-centric tool that tracks user experience on your APIs. It lets you track API issues that are impacting customers and take proactive action to fix them. The ‘alert rules’ feature lets you track various metrics and alert you whenever a threshold is breached, for example, a sudden surge in the number of site visitors or a spike in CPU utilization. You can integrate this tool with collaboration tools such as Slack to get alerted at a team level.
The ‘user notification’ feature gives you the list of customers or visitors who have used your API and their behavior, which can help you in marketing, retargeting, and customer retention. You can also integrate Moesif with CRM tools like Hubspot and Salesforce to reinforce your marketing automation.
The tool offers multiple prebuilt team dashboards for different projects or departments to focus on what’s important to them.
11. Uptrends
Uptrends provides monitoring for websites, APIs, servers, and more. It touts a happy customer base of 25,000, with names such as Vimeo, Microsoft, Volkswagen, and more, among its clients. One unique feature of Uptrends is browser-based testing. The service spins up actual different browsers to run your app/website and provides a detailed metric on how it performs. But response times and metrics are only half the story. Uptrends also give you a detailed, asset-wise performance report, so you know exactly what’s causing a bottleneck where. When an error is encountered, the service takes a screenshot and sends it to you, so you can see exactly how it feels on the other end of the equation.
12. Dotcom-Monitor
The Dotcom-Monitor platform allows you to configure a multi-task monitor device using an HTTP/S task. With that, you can monitor OAuth 2.0-based web APIs for availability, performance, and proper responses. By replicating one or more end-client requests and monitoring a SOAP web service, Dotcom-Monitor agents verify that data can be properly exchanged between the API and a web application.
When an agent detects an error, it checks it against the device’s filter. If the error is not filtered out, the device fires an alert. You can configure multiple alert groups and set up customized alert schedules and escalation options. Reports are available in CSV, PDF, and TXT formats. They show multiple and useful metrics, such as response times, downtime, and average performance by location.
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