We are continuing our quest to make the API lifecycle more real-time and wanted to explore how we can make the testing and monitoring of our API infrastructure more interactive. APIs aren’t just for delivering data and content to the web and mobile applications, they are also for accessing data about the operations of these APIs. To demonstrate what is possible at this level of API operations, we wanted to take the APIs from the API monitoring and testing provider API Fortress, and see what happens when you turn their APIs into streams.
API Fortress provides their customers with the ability to test and monitor APIs and using their APIs you can access insights about those tests. Making for a pretty interesting target for turning into a real-time flow of information about the health of API operations using Streamdata.io. As we began looking at how to turn their APIs into streams, we noticed they already provided streaming versions of their insights events and metric streams, providing examples of both of their streams in action:
– API Testing Events Stream API – Each event represents a test run and will provide information on failures and successes.
– API Testing Metrics Stream API – These items are generated by API Fortress when a request is made and contains information on how the endpoint behaved.
API Fortress is using Server-Sent Events (SSE) for their streaming technology, making it easy to stream API monitoring and testing results. The other thing to note is that API Fortress provides their streaming APIs right alongside their regular APIs, which is something we feel every API provider should be doing with their high volume APIs. Which is one of the reasons why we felt compelled to showcase what they are up to, even though API Fortress doesn’t use Streamdata.io to deliver their streaming APIs. We feel their APIs provide a good example of API service providers who get the value of making their resources available as simple web APIs, as well as streaming APIs.
We are always interested in API providers and API service providers using Streamdata.io to make their APIs available as streams. However, we are still happy to showcase the providers who are doing things right, even if they don’t use our services. We will be profiling API Fortress and adding it to our API Gallery, showcasing their regular, as well as streaming APIs. Their APIs provide a pretty compelling opportunity to make the API lifecycle more real-time and turn the monitoring and testing of our APIs into real-time streams that we can pipe into our dashboards, and other applications we are using to keep a handle on the overall health and stability of our API operations.
