Feature Friday - Key Reasons Why Should You Be Using API Monitoring

June is finally here! And with it, summer arrives! I’m sure everyone is excited for the warm days and fun-filled evenings to come. So, let’s leave Spring in the past, just like we here at Qyrus are leaving manual testing and traditional automated testing methods in the past! Put on your shades, break out the sunscreen, and get ready for the blinding brilliance that is API monitoring. This week we are joined again by Daniel and Joyal, two members from our Chicago Qyrus team, to give more insight into API monitoring and the various benefits it provides users. Without further to do, let’s jump right into it!

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Tell us more about API monitoring offered by Qyrus and its use cases.

Daniel:
Well, simply put, API monitoring is a service that checks the status of an API call by continuously calling that API and examining the results.

Joyal:
Yup, it monitors the health of the API, making sure that the right people are notified whenever something goes wrong. This helps prevent long periods of service disruption where users might be dealing with interruptions for hours.

Daniel:
Certain APIs are critical to an application’s ability to serve its users. API monitoring can potentially catch errors before users do. In a way you can say it’s testing the reliability of your API.

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It’s very true that certain APIs can be quite literally “mission critical” when it comes to a functioning application. I mean, imagine if the search API for Google went down. The world might literally come close to burning down.

What is API monitoring’s overall impact on the testing process?

Joyal:
Well, I’d say we see the most impact in terms of reporting. The whole premise of API monitoring is to provide users with constant feedback in the form of a report. Users can see a lot of different metrics here.

Daniel:
And you can take things a step further, by allowing this reporting to notify you via email about the status of your API and its overall health such as when the average response time crosses a certain threshold and if the API goes down in general.

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Monitoring the health of your API sounds complicated. However, Qyrus seeks to make testing simpler for all types of users – whether they be seasoned testing veterans or totally clueless about coding. In the past, testing was complicated. Today, it’s our job to make it more accessible for all.

How might API monitoring help testers, developers, and business technologists? What value can this feature bring?

Joyal:
API monitoring can bring a wide range of benefits for different types of people. Regular testers wouldn’t use this service to “test” APIs, but rather to keep tabs on the overall health of their critical APIs.

Daniel:
Yeah, and developers might use this service for the exact same reason. But also, they can use it to monitor any quirks or weird issues like random response time spikes that their API might be witnessing without their knowledge. And business technologists could use this service to share performance data with a client of theirs, or even internally. More importantly, I think, is that it’s so easy to set up that less technical people like business techs can set up and operate an API monitoring session.

Joyal:
That’s right, Daniel. That’s really the essence of Qyrus, isn’t it? We try to make everything as intuitive as it can be – and code free!

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Making testing simple takes a lot of work. It’s not easy for us to extrapolate the complexity of automated testing in a codeless and intuitive fashion. That being said – how complicated would this be to, say, try and do this on your own?

Does the same or similar functionality exist without Qyrus?

Daniel:
In order to get anywhere near what our API monitoring feature offers, it’d take a good amount of coding and prior knowledge on different 3^rd party technologies to make everything work.

Joyal:
Of course, it can be done. But, like Dan said, it would take a lot of effort. On top of that, we offer a good deal of reusability on Qyrus itself. The functional API tests you build on Qyrus can be imported into API monitoring and set up very quickly.

Daniel:
And it’s also important to note that in functional API testing, you can import APIs from Swagger format or OpenAPI specifications. These additional features really help tie everything together.

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The reusability and ease of use combined makes for a disruptive duo. That being said, it’s sure to make some people’s lives a lot easier. In a day-to-day scenario, what might take place?

How do you see API monitoring impacting day-to-day operations across organizations?

Joyal:
Overall, it’ll make monitoring the health of APIs easier. You’ll probably see less performance testing overall and you won’t have to manually trigger APIs to check on health. The goal is to have the developer alerted about the issue before it becomes an issue for clients.

Daniel:
Yup, and you only have to set up the API monitor once. It measures the reliability of the API, more accurately. And overall, it’ll make testing over prolonged periods of time much simpler.

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API monitoring can bring a lot of benefits as we’ve seen. It represents a holistic and complete API testing experience – taking functional testing to another level – reliability testing. We won’t keep you any longer! Got your sunscreen applied? Sunglasses in hand? Get out there and enjoy the weather! Thanks for joining us for this week’s Feature Friday!