Mastering IPM: API monitoring for digital resilience

APIs now underpin nearly every digital interaction, even though most users don’t notice them. From making a payment online to booking a ride or searching for products, APIs quietly connect services, move data, and authenticate transactions in real time.

A comprehensive overview of API trends reports that 90% of organizations have an API program or are planning to launch one within the next 12 months. This reliance on APIs has created a new set of challenges: complex, multi-step transactions, third-party dependencies, and evolving architectures such as GraphQL. Monitoring APIs for availability alone is no longer enough. Organizations need to take an Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) approach that measures performance, validates functionality, and ensures resilience across every dependency.

In this installment of our IPM Best Practices Series, we’ll explore how organizations can monitor APIs effectively to ensure resilience and user satisfaction.  

What role do APIs play in today’s digital services?

This diagram depicts the basic steps in a typical online sneaker purchase. What the shopper does not see is everything that happens in the background, making this transaction look highly straightforward. Even before the shopper encounters the UI, a series of steps is initiated, beginning with DNS and progressing to fetching content from the server. APIs take center stage as they interact with the UI, bridging the gap between the front-end and targeted services. Initiating a shoe search triggers the search service, which checks the database to see if the sneakers are in stock. Simultaneously, inventory service requests provide additional information, like colors, sizes, and cost.  

The modern consumer expects all of this to occur in the time it takes to blink. What happens, though, when something goes wrong?

Why does API failure have such a big impact on users?

Depending on the context and the nature of the application, API failure can have several catastrophic impacts on users, including functional disruption, data inaccuracies, loss of features, delayed updates, and security concerns.  

If a third-party search widget on your e-commerce site fails, your customers cannot browse through your store. So, right from the outset, user experience is severely compromised, leading to frustrated customers who’ll likely abandon their transaction and try out the competition.  

If the API call is responsible for fetching or updating data, an unresponsive API call can result in outdated or incorrect information being displayed to the user. Think of the potential impact of zip or postal code lookups becoming unresponsive on a ride-hailing app - the angry customers, the load on customer support, the outrage on Twitter.  

If the APIs connecting to your payment gateways fail, you lose both customers and revenue, not to mention the impact on security. As APIs carry business-critical information, the loss of data integrity and security vulnerabilities become significant concerns, leaving your organization susceptible to cyber-attacks and data breaches.

What makes API resilience a business-critical issue?

Failure to address API issues promptly can have dire repercussions on business continuity and overall success. Monitoring APIs and ensuring their responsiveness thus becomes a critical consideration for businesses seeking to integrate them into their infrastructure.  

Why are traditional monitoring tools not enough for APIs?

The challenge is that APIs function within intricate webs of third-party dependencies, dynamic architectures, and microservice meshes, which often exceed the capabilities of traditional monitoring tools. The growing adoption of GraphQL APIs further amplifies this challenge. GraphQL's core flexibility empowers clients to request specific fields and nested data structures. While this adaptability is beneficial, it can complicate predicting the precise format and size of incoming requests.  

What best practices strengthen API monitoring?

To ensure performant APIs, businesses must make room for an API monitoring phase in their API Lifecycle to improve performance. Consistent monitoring helps keep uptime high and outage rates low across all applications and services. Below are some essential API monitoring best practices:

1. Go beyond API availability; validate functional uptime
   Monitoring API availability is critical but not enough for API transactions involving data exchange. You have to test various verbs such as Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) services against all of the application resources that are exposed via the API to ensure that they are operational.  
   
   Using synthetic monitoring tools with multi-step API monitors is one way to improve API availability with data reliability. Just remember, synthetic monitoring uses only a predefined set of API calls. Therefore, real-world traffic can be different from the inputs in synthetic monitoring.  

2. Account for API dependencies
   APIs do not operate in isolation; they are interconnected components of a larger ecosystem. Your application's APIs likely depend on other internal or external APIs, and any disruption in these dependencies can affect your services. It's crucial to monitor not only your APIs but also third-party APIs your application relies on, regardless of whether they have their own monitoring strategies.  

3. Adopt automated testing into API monitoring
   The CI/CD and DevOps approaches promote ongoing and automated testing. By establishing a robust API monitoring strategy that covers each phase of the CI/CD pipeline and includes frequent checks, you can significantly improve the performance of your API throughout the code release cycle.  

4. Choose tools with proactive alerting capabilities
   Tools that offer only metric visualization require continuous manual monitoring to detect and address API issues. Therefore, selecting an API monitoring tool with robust alerting functions is essential for efficient error handling.
   

How does Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) enhance API resilience?

APIs are no longer hidden plumbing; they’re critical dependencies in every digital supply chain. A single failure can slow transactions, frustrate customers, and cost millions in lost revenue. Resilience requires more than uptime checks—it demands monitoring APIs for availability, performance, reachability, and reliability, while accounting for third-party services and the full Internet Stack.

With an IPM strategy for API monitoring, organizations gain visibility from the end-user experience all the way through backend services. This proactive approach enables faster detection of degradations, quicker root cause analysis, and greater assurance that APIs will continue to support critical business functions

API Monitoring: Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between API monitoring and API testing?
API testing is typically done during development to confirm that endpoints function correctly. API monitoring runs continuously in production, checking performance, availability, and reliability over time to catch degradations before they affect users. Learn more in our guide to critical requirements for modern API monitoring.

How do synthetic monitors help detect API issues?
Synthetic monitoring simulates API requests from different locations and networks, providing proactive visibility into latency, availability, and response content. This allows teams to detect issues before real users encounter them.

Why is validating API response content as important as uptime?
An API can be “up” but still return the wrong data. Validating response content ensures that APIs are not only available but also delivering correct and complete information—critical for user journeys such as search, checkout, or authentication. See how response validation protected a retailer’s site in our web API monitoring case study.

• Elevate your API resilience today; contact us to learn more.  
• Read our guide to discover more API monitoring tips and tricks.
• Visit our demo hub to see Catchpoint IPM at work.