How to Ensure the Reliability of Your API Infrastructure

There are currently hundreds of APIs for different aspects of our life, such as finance, e-commerce, payments, social messaging, and other categories. They cover everything we do with applications and program applications to do with other applications. Indeed, APIs technology has grown so fast in sharing and analyzing data across various applications.

Developers who build APIs should know how well the systems work. Without knowing your API reliability, you can’t be sure everything works as expected. Whether you’re building an app to book a flight, sharing a funny post to your chat, or checking any discounts on an e-commerce app, you’re using an API that facilitates data sharing from one application to another. Thus, you rely on the APIs to have applications able to communicate with one another.

Why do you need a reliable API?

Today consumers expect a fast, cheap, yet reliable digital customer experience. They will evaluate brands entirely on the experience, making APIs technology critical for many businesses. In modern B2B usage, integrating data flows with customers and partner systems means you need to have good API reliability to support their needs.

Dynamic business transactions involve documents exchange like purchase orders (PO), which shows an evolution of the B2B e-commerce landscape. Shipping APIs, for example, allows e-commerce companies to integrate with multiple carriers, providing better shipping options for the end customers quickly. These companies evaluate the shipping APIs by how reliable the service is.

A reliable shipping API–and any other API–will always return the requested information accurately and consistently. If a business page fails to load shipping rates, this can mean losing revenue during peak season. The business will then be wasting the money spent to get customers to complete the transaction.

This tells us that APIs are essential to running a data-driven business, which is mostly what companies are nowadays. Business users and IT teams can leverage the software and applications to increase productivity and improve the bottom line. From social collaboration tools to more innovative services for customer experience, utilizing APIs can bring profit to the organization.

What makes an API reliable?

Not only to meet business needs, but APIs should also be reliable. Your API reliability will make people want to keep using it, building atop a service they can trust.

There are a few things that make API reliable, such as:

• Security: who can access your API, and do they comply with your terms and conditions?
• Availability: how often do your API endpoints experience downtime?
• Consistency: are your API endpoints well-documented and predictable?
• Low Latency: how quickly does your API respond to requests?
• Status: do you report outages and scheduled maintenance to your users?

API monitoring to ensure its reliability

An essential part of monitoring API is implementing alerts since you need to know when your API has failed as soon as possible. API monitoring can also be done by tracking your key reliability metrics. Monitor API logs by creating specific tests to call the logs, where they give information every time API endpoint was requested. This includes how long it took to execute, who requested it, and if the request succeeded.

In addition, the values to take from continuously monitoring API reliability is seeing patterns and spotting anomalies. Monitoring API allows you to:

• Analyze trends: How quickly is the number of requests growing?
• Compare API performance over time: Are your responses slower than last week?
• Debug your API: Your error rate went up; what else changed around the same time?

Don’t forget to include testing when monitoring your API reliability. Run authentication, availability, and speed tests regularly because API performance can be affected by various factors. Doing frequent testing will make it easier to know and maintain the optimal condition of your API.

API reliability is critical for many businesses, so you need to choose the right API provider company that can support your needs. As a reliable and the largest open finance platform in Southeast Asia, Ayoconnect offers a range of solutions that play a crucial role in advancing Indonesia’s financial inclusion. You can build the most convenient payment method for your customers using Ayoconnect’s API. Get started now by visiting our website here!

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