Jamie Beckland, Chief Product Officer at APIContext, stresses the importance of monitoring APIs in this exclusive piece for IoT Insider
Modern enterprises have increasingly adopted Cloud application programming interfaces (APIs) in recent years because of the critical role they play in driving digital transformation success. APIs enable applications to communicate and transfer information to one another, paving the way for more innovative services and streamlining business operations. This fosters innovation, creates new markets, and enhances customer experiences – but all this innovation can’t come at the expense of security and resiliency. That’s why performance monitoring of APIs is essential.
Cloud APIs offer an abundance of functions with some providing access to additional API data integrations while many facilitate synchronisation between applications and databases. This enables seamless data and information sharing among teams across different departments and external partners, which helps to enhance communication and security within modern enterprises. Additionally, one area where APIs have been crucial in facilitating and pushing forward technological innovation within modern enterprises has been in the Internet of Things (IoT) market.
The role of IoT APIs
The Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud computing are both major contributors to the rapidly evolving technological landscape. While IoT and Cloud computing by definition are two different concepts, they often go hand in hand since IoT connects physical devices to the internet and Cloud computing stores and processes IoT data on remote servers. In simplified terms, IoT serves as the data source, and Cloud computing helps to facilitate the management of the data.
There are many modern enterprises that have implemented IoT solutions alongside Cloud adoption to help accelerate their digital transformation journeys. Yet, APIs are undoubtedly the unsung heroes of this process as they help to facilitate seamless information exchanges between IoT devices and platforms. APIs that are used in the development of IoT solution, often referred to as IoT APIs, enable developers to create and design advanced applications that can easily integrate with other web services from a range of devices.
Ultimately, APIs enable organisations and service providers to deliver exceptional end-user experience. However, the efficiency of these interactions heavily depends on the reliability and performance of the APIs. Thus, enterprises must carry out effective API monitoring to ensure functionality, minimise website security threats, resolve existing performance issues quickly and, most importantly, improve user experience.
Measuring API availability metrics
Due to the complex architecture of APIs, there are an array of metrics that can be monitored to ensure API performance. One of the most fundamental metrics to monitor for judging API quality is availability or uptime score of the API as this metric decides the quality of experience that users are receiving. API monitoring ensures that API-connected resources are available, functioning correctly, and responding to calls effectively. This is important as when an API becomes unavailable, it can lead to application errors, impaired functionality, or delayed loading times.
As a result, users are negatively impacted and discouraged from interacting with the organisation’s product or service. These incidents risk not only losing customer loyalty but could also attract negative reviews and feedback, potentially harming the organisation’s reputation. Additionally, this can hinder the effective utilisation of IoT solutions within modern enterprises. Continuous API monitoring is crucial for IoT developers, as a means of carrying out effective API management, since this process further supports early detection of any unforeseen issues and failure possibilities.
Yet, Cloud software service providers such as AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM are finding it challenging to scale hardware at the same pace as consumption growth when contending with the constantly evolving Cloud ecosystem, which has significantly grown by 20% in the past 12 months.
In fact, according to APIContext’s annual 2024 Cloud Service Provider API Report, in 2023 only 7% of API services worldwide achieved a 99.99% service availability score, a significant drop from 18% in 2022. Even if the 99.99% service availability is achieved, it still equates to more than five minutes of downtime in a year. The rise of remote working, combined with the emergence of AI and machine learning computing, could almost certainly be the catalysts for the service availability decline, significantly impacting how Cloud service providers maintain the speed and quality of their services.
Best practices for API management
Evidently, APIs play a significant role in assisting modern enterprises to grow, scale, and introduce new services to meet user demands, by enhancing the end-user experience and eradicating the need for developers to rewrite core applications. Equally, APIs are core to IoT for similar reasons including ensuring the effective utilisation of pre-existing functions to streamline smooth software processing, empowering IoT devices for seamless information exchange.
Yet, without effective management, potential errors within the APIs are left unnoticed, which could cause the quality of user experience to rapidly decline. Thus, monitoring API availability and latency is key for organisations to ensure high performance rates within the networks infrastructure and in Cloud environments. Additionally, organisations should consider standardising the performance and quality of their APIs against competitors, to guarantee the delivery of exceptional service to users.
By carrying out an effective API management strategy, organisations can harness the full power of IoT, driving growth and success in an increasingly connected world. Ideally, organisations should invest in a solution that integrates all API monitoring tools into one unified platform. This will ensure that critical APIs remain secure and consistently provide the highest level of user experience.
Author: Jamie Beckland, Chief Product Officer at APIContext
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