15 Best API Monitoring Tools
Application programming interfaces (APIs) power countless applications and services in today’s world. However, the complexity and scale of modern API ecosystems often create a blind spot for developers and operations teams. API monitoring can solve a lot of these challenges.
In this article, we discuss some core concepts and the benefits of API monitoring, along with key API metrics you should track. We also discuss how to select the right monitoring tool and a curated list of the top 15 API monitoring tools available today.
Table of Contents
- Key Takeaways
- Understanding API Monitoring
- Benefits of API Monitoring
- Criteria for Selecting an API Monitoring Tool
- Top 15 API Monitoring Tools
- How to Implement API Monitoring
- Best Practices for Effective API Monitoring
- Summary
Key Takeaways
- API monitoring helps you maintain the performance, security, and reliability of applications. It tracks key metrics like response times, latency, and error rates to detect and resolve issues promptly.
- An effective API monitoring tool offers capabilities like ease of use, real-time monitoring, detailed performance metrics, robust alerting, and integration with existing systems.
- To pick the best tool, consider factors such as scalability, comprehensive monitoring features, integration with current platforms, and user-friendliness.
Understanding API Monitoring
API monitoring helps you continuously observe key metrics like response times, latency, error rates, and overall API health. It allows you to maintain robust APIs that function smoothly without any hiccups. As a result, applications and websites that depend on your APIs remain performant, secure, and healthy.
A comprehensive API monitoring solution covers a lot of ground for organizations. It can maintain app and site performance, security, uptime, and user monitoring, while also facilitating recovery from outages. However, the challenges of API monitoring often revolve around scale, experience, and the need for comprehensive application monitoring.
What is API Monitoring?
API monitoring is the process of observing and evaluating the performance, functionality, and reliability of APIs to ensure they meet expected standards. It involves tracking the availability and speed of APIs, along with the correctness of data flowing to and from them.
API monitoring is a continuous process, specially for those in production. It helps maintain their performance and reliability, by detecting issues like slowdowns, errors, and functionality problems before they affect end users. You can achieve this consistency and continuity through automation, which a lot of API monitoring tools offer out-of-the-box. Thanks to smart automation, you get real-time insights into API performance.
Importance of API Monitoring
API monitoring guarantees proper communication among software applications and different services. It acts as a preventive measure against issues that could disrupt services. Monitoring helps you identify bugs and changes in third-party API endpoints, thereby averting timeouts or latency issues. Additionally, robust alerting allows for timely responses to potential disruptions. You get minimum downtime and consequently, avoid disrupting and potentially improving user satisfaction.
API monitoring also plays a critical role in optimizing performance and preventing security breaches. It makes sure that your API delivers accurate data to users, which directly improves user engagement. In this day and age, failing to monitor APIs effectively means violating basic security protocols and hence compromising millions worth of assets.
Key API Metrics
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Response time: Tracks the total time from the moment a request reaches the server until the server sends back a response. This metric includes both network delay and server processing time. Monitoring response time allows developers to spot performance bottlenecks and optimize processing efficiency. When response time increases, it often signals server issues or network congestion.
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Latency: Captures the time delay between when a request leaves the client and reaches the server, focusing on network-related delays. High latency often points to poor network conditions or long geographical distances between the client and server. Reducing latency improves data transmission speed and improves user experience.
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Error rate: Measures the percentage of API requests that return errors, like 4xx (client errors) or 5xx (server errors). A higher error rate usually indicates bugs in the API, misconfigurations, or client-side issues. Tracking error rates helps teams quickly pinpoint and resolve underlying problems, ensuring reliability.
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Errors per minute: Tracks how frequently errors occur in API requests over time, providing insight into the API’s stability. Sudden spikes in this metric usually suggest critical issues or outages. Regularly monitoring it ensures that teams respond quickly to maintain a smooth user experience.
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CPU and Memory Usage: Displays the resources the server allocates for running the API. High usage often indicates inefficient code or excessive load, which can slow down response times. In serverless environments, monitoring CPU and memory can highlight cold start delays or potential resource limits.
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Availability or uptime: Tracks the percentage of time the API remains accessible and operational, typically expressed as a percentage over a specific period. A higher uptime indicates a reliable and resilient API.
Benefits of API Monitoring
Improved Performance
Routinely monitoring APIs helps ensure they perform optimally by identifying slowdowns and performance bottlenecks. Some monitoring tools can monitor transactions end-to-end. You get real-time metrics that can pinpoint exact issues you’re troubleshooting for.
Moreover, you can simulate real-world scenarios and continuously check API responses in those scenarios. This helps you identify possible points of failure and performance issues before your product hits production.
Enhanced Security
API monitoring can reveal anomalous behavior that may indicate potential breaches. You can use thresholds and anomaly detection in alerting systems to identify issues that routine checks might fail to spot.
Artificial intelligence has impacted almost every aspect of today’s digital landscape, including API monitoring tools. These modern tools use machine learning algorithms to detect significant deviations from expected patterns.
With more digitalization, cyber threats have been rising alarmingly. If you want to minimize security threats and safeguard sensitive data, you have to invest in monitoring your APIs. Look for real-time security features in monitoring tools such as authentication, authorization, and encryption.
Increased Reliability
Regular API monitoring contributes to higher uptime. It guarantees that applications stay available and reliable for users. Monitoring your API’s availability ensures that it remains operational and accessible to users. Specifically, include functional uptime validation in your monitoring pipelines so that various API services remain operational, not just available.
In a nutshell, API monitoring brings increased reliability and availability of web services through the following:
- Alerting administrators about dependencies.
- Allowing IT teams to act to keep applications online, ensuring API uptime.
- Helping avoid extended periods of downtime or degraded performance by addressing issues before they impact customers.
- Proactively detecting and responding to potential outages for continuous service.
- Collecting metrics on API usage and anomalies, so that you can fine tune your rate-limiting and management strategies for API calls.
Criteria for Selecting an API Monitoring Tool
Choosing the right API monitoring solution can significantly impact the success and efficiency of your digital operations. As a matter of strategic investment, you have to consider several key aspects, including operational requirements and feature sets, before closing in on a tool. Let’s discuss the key features API monitoring should provide you:
Ease of Use
A user-friendly API monitoring tool greatly compliments your existing resources. It has great accessibility features so your team members, irrespective of skill levels, can easily embrace it. An ideal tool in this regard should have the following key traits:
- Easy to set up and configure without extensive coding or technical skills.
- User-friendly, reducing the learning curve and increasing team productivity.
- Allows quick onboarding and efficient utilization.
Comprehensive Monitoring Capabilities
Ideally, organizations want a tool that covers most, if not all, of their monitoring requirements. For example:
- Real-time monitoring, including uptime monitoring.
- An array of performance metrics such as response time, latency, throughput, and error rates.
- Detailed insights into API performance and usage trends.
- A detailed breakdown of network timing data for faster root cause analysis.
- Response time by location to pinpoint issues more efficiently.
- Robust alerting functionality to quickly handle and debug API errors.
- The ability to separate network latency from API response time in its alerts.
Integration with Existing Systems
When you integrate an API monitoring tool with existing systems, pay attention to minimizing disruptions and streamline workflow. The right API monitoring tool should integrate with existing tools and platforms for API development and testing. API monitoring tools should support seamless integration with the frameworks and programming languages the APIs use.
You don’t want to pick a tool that doesn’t work well with your existing development and operations platforms. Moreover, if you can integrate your API monitoring tool with other monitoring systems, you can get a more comprehensive overview of system health. It can likely narrow down your focus area and provide a more unified analytical view into your entire system as a whole.
Scalability
API monitoring tools must scale to accommodate growing API traffic and complex systems as a business expands. When selecting an API monitoring tool, assess its ability to scale with your organization’s growth and increasing API traffic. A scalable API monitoring tool should handle higher loads and increased complexity without compromising performance.
Top 15 API Monitoring Tools
Hopefully, the preceding section have given you the core guidelines to help you choose the best tool for your use case. To further help you make an informed decision, here we curate a list of the top 15 API monitoring tools. We briefly discuss each with its own unique features and capabilities to give you a head start in your decision-making process.
Moesif
Moesif provides the following features:
- Detailed insights into API usage patterns, user behavior, and product-level metrics.
- Tracking individual user actions and API usage.
- Real-time API event data, providing instant feedback on any issues, while enabling businesses to visualize and investigate live API traffic.
- Advanced, granular, and real-time alerting based on both technical performance and business metrics, with immediate notification of anomalies or critical issues.
- Advanced anomaly detection to identify unusual patterns or behaviors in API usage
Apart from these features, Moesif stands out by supporting API governance. Directly from the same platform, you can monitor and enforce compliance with legal, security, or rate-limiting rules.
Datadog
Datadog APM (Application Performance Monitoring) offers:
- AI-powered code-level distributed tracing from browser and mobile applications to backend services and databases.
- Correlation of traces with logs, metrics, RUM data, security signals, and other telemetry.
- Faster detection and resolution of root causes.
New Relic
New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring and optimization for infrastructure and applications. Here are some of its features:
- APM: offers in-depth visibility into application performance
- Infrastructure monitoring: monitors the supporting infrastructure
- Real user monitoring: tracks user experience in real-time
- Synthetic monitoring: simulates user interactions to test application performance.
Postman
Postman, a popular API testing platform, also comes with comprehensive monitoring options. Here are some of the key features it offers:
- Scheduled monitoring to automate and continuously check API health.
- Custom assertions in JavaScript to validate API responses.
- Regional testing to identify performance issues across different locations.
- Detailed reports and alerts with insights and real-time notifications for API failures or thresholds.
Better Stack
Better Stack help developers troubleshoot API-related issues in real-time, serveing as a unified observability platform. It offers integrations with popular third-party tools and platforms:
- Heroku
- Datadog
- New Relic
- AWS CloudWatch
Some of Better Stack’s key features include the following:
- Integration with incident management tools to notify teams of API issues instantly through multiple communication channels.
- Testing from multiple global regions for detection of location-specific performance issues.
- Comprehensive performance reports, including latency, uptime, and response time metrics.
SigNoz
SigNoz is an open-source APM tool designed specifically for monitoring API performance. It provides detailed metrics and tracing data, allowing users to capture and visualize tracing data. As an open-source tool, SigNoz offers flexibility for customization and extension based on specific needs.
Prometheus
Prometheus is designed to track the performance, health, and behavior of APIs, among other components. It utilizes PromQL, a powerful query language, for different features:
- Selecting and aggregating time series data
- Creating custom metrics and alerts
- Visualizing data in real-time
- Generating detailed performance reports
Graphite
Graphite is a prominent API monitoring tool known for tracking and visualizing time-series data. It specializes in storing numeric metrics over time, allowing for detailed performance monitoring.
It also integrates with Grafana, among many other tools, to enhance your monitoring experience by providing rich, interactive visualizations of collected data.
Sauce Labs
Sauce Labs is an all-in-one platform providing comprehensive tools for both functional and performance monitoring. It supports thorough functional testing to ensure API correctness and in-depth performance monitoring to track API responsiveness and load handling.
Sauce Labs also supports cross-browser and device monitoring so you can verify your API’s functionality across different environments.
Sematext
Sematext offers a comprehensive monitoring solution that supports infrastructure, databases, and applications. It provides real-time insights and monitoring capabilities across different environments. You can configure alerts and send notifications through various channels like email, Slack, or webhooks. Sematext also integrates with other monitoring solutions and dashboards, making it easy to track API health alongside other infrastructure metrics.
Assertible
Assertible simplifies functional API testing and monitoring by allowing users to create tests. These tests define the API response expectations using standard validation patterns.
It supports collaborative monitoring so that teams can create tests, debug errors, and track API performance together. Assertible also offers codeless API monitoring, eliminating the need for writing code to validate APIs.
RapidAPI
RapidAPI centralizes various API operations, providing a singular platform for managing and interacting with APIs. It offers a hub containing a wide array of APIs that have already gone through testing and are ready for use. Like some other tools we’ve already discussed, it offers real-time alerts, detailed metrics reports, and more.
AppDynamics
AppDynamics offers these key features:
- Comprehensive visibility into API performance, tracking response times, throughput, and error rates across distributed systems.
- Anomaly detection in API performance through machine learning and automatic alerts when issues arise.
- Correlation of API performance with business transactions, helping teams understand the impact of API performance on end user experience.
SmartBear (AlertSite)
AlertSite by SmartBear offers codeless synthetic monitoring to ensure smooth and efficient API transactions. It monitors API availability, performance, and functional correctness. Users can easily create advanced API monitors from the dashboard or by reusing existing OpenAPI or Swagger definitions or SoapUI tests.
Dotcom-Monitor
Dotcom-Monitor provides tools to assess web performance in different ways:
- Simulating user interactions
- Ensuring websites perform optimally
- Offering detailed performance reports with actionable insights to optimize website functionality.
The multi-step monitoring feature can simulate complex user journeys across web applications to identify performance issues.
How to Implement API Monitoring
To implement your API monitoring system or pipeline, the first step consists of setting up API tests. These API tests must reflect different aspects such as verifying different functionalities, performance monitoring, and availability inspection. A robust test suite can thereby make sure your API operates efficiently.
You can simplify the process by using tools like APIMetrics. It allows for easy setup and configuration through a user-friendly interface.
Let’s discuss the implementation process briefly.
Setting Up Monitoring Tools
Begin by identifying the key metrics, such as response time and uptime, that are vital to your API’s performance. Then integrate your monitoring tool with CI/CD pipelines for continuous testing and monitoring. We recommend that you set up automated testing in every stage of the CI/CD pipeline.
Finally, set up alerts in your monitoring tools to receive notifications when API performance metrics breach predefined thresholds.
Analyzing Data
Inspect the monitoring data and reports your tool generates. For example, trends in response time can reveal patterns suggestive of performance decline.
Another thing to focus on is maintaining comprehensive documentation of API responses and errors. This immensely helps with troubleshooting and debugging sessions since you may already have the relevant piece of information close at hand. When prospecting new clients or working on POCs, this documentation can also come in handy.
Continuous Improvement
Regularly update and refine your monitoring configurations. Always remember to refer to historical data insights. Incorporate feedback from monitoring data into the development cycle to address performance issues proactively and improve API reliability. A combination of these approaches can lead to continuous improvement in API performance.
Best Practices for Effective API Monitoring
So you’ve finally selected the perfect monitoring tool for your use case. Now if you want to maximize it and the resources API monitoring gives you, you have to abide by some best practices.
Regular Testing and Validation
Regular API testing offers several benefits. For example:
- Identification and resolution of issues before they impact end users.
- Compatibility of application code with new schema versions of third-party APIs.
- Continuous monitoring for feature changes to ensure compatibility with external services after updates or bug fixes.
Frequent validation of APIs against their specifications ensures they meet the required standards for performance and security.
Proactive Alert Systems
Alerts can inform users about any deviations from predefined thresholds. It allows you to proactively resolve issues and maintain optimal API performance. You can’t expect better user experience by keeping users in the dark about issues, specially if they can impact the users directly. It can cause catastrophic issues and disruptions in their lives that can potentially lead to you losing valuable customers and revenue.
Effective alerting regimens ensure the right people get notified of problems as soon as they emerge. Tools with strong alerting capabilities can notify you immediately of API errors. They help you address issues before they impact end users and escalate to serious levels. If they do impact end users, you get the time to inform them beforehand.
Documentation and Reporting
Maintaining detailed documentation of API metrics such as response time, error rate, and uptime enhances transparency and effectively monitors progress. Thorough documentation of API monitoring processes and results help you track progress and maintain transparency. Regular reporting on API performance and issues can help in making informed decisions and planning improvements.
Summary
API monitoring has become an indispensable practice to maintain the health, performance, and security of today’s digital infrastructure. Through effective implementation of API monitoring systems, you can guarantee your product a stable trajectory towards sustainable growth.
We’ve briefly discussed Moesif and some of the features it offers as an API monitoring solution. But Moesif stands out in the market as a “comprehensive platform” that can cover your needs throughout the entire API lifecycle.
Our AI-enhanced platform gives you user-centric API observability and monitoring, powered by robust analytics tools. We’ve also built powerful monetization features that integrates seamlessly with popular providers like Stripe and Recurly.
But you don’t have to take our words for it. Sign up today for a free trial and try Moesif for yourself, no credit cards required.
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