API Metrics Weekly Report: GitHub vs. Microsoft Office

GitHub is a perennially performant API, which this week again tops the Corporate Infrastructure API metrics. Usually, though Microsoft Office is the fastest API in the category, but not this week with GitHub pipping it to the top spot.

GitHub is an excellent API. It is 3 ms faster overall than Microsoft Office, but it has a 100% pass rate compared to 99.99% and just 0.54% outliers compared to 2.21%, which is why Microsoft Office overall languishes at 12 out of 19 in terms of our API metrics CASC score.

GitHub is fast for DNS lookup Time – 4 or 12 ms everywhere, which is close to the ideal performance. Using an active API monitoring system will let you where the rate-determining steps are in your latency.

Microsoft Office isn’t showing API metrics as good. It is getting a couple of 28 ms times, but more importantly 60 ms for Google in North America and 125 ms for IBM Cloud in North America and 253 ms in Oceania.

Through active monitoring of all of your API metrics, you can see just where your performance is being affected. You cannot assume that just because things are working well from one cloud or region, they will be working well from all of them.

It’s these variations that make the difference between good performance and best in class performance.

GitHub has some significant API metrics variations in Handshake Time. Here Oceania is faster than North America and South America is by far the slowest region. Rectifying the causes of this discrepancy will make GitHub an even better API.

API Metrics: Tops in Overall Quality

Week Ending 15 February 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	GitHub	9.62
COVID-19	WHO	9.23
Search	Google	9.39
Social Networks	Twitter	9.61
UK Government	GOV.UK	9.86
US Government	Department of Justice	9.91
Messaging APIs	Ring Central (Sandbox)	9.23

Department of Justice in the US Government category takes the overall title again this week with a CASC score of 9.91, up from 9.87 last week. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional. Four of the seven API metrics categories are headed by organizations with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week, up from 2 last week. Four of the seven categories are headed by organizations with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week, up from two last week. Sustaining a CASC score of >9.25 over a period of several weeks is a good showing and congratulations to those organizations that achieved it. This week, five of the seven categories are topped by an API with a CASC score of 9.28 or more.

API Metrics: Top Performers by Latency

Week Ending 15 February 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	GitHub	216 ms
COVID-19	WHO	92 ms
Search	Google	398 ms
Social Networks	Google	56 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	83 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	46 ms
Messaging APIs	Slack	271 ms

Department of Justice in the US Government API metrics category takes the overall title again with a median latency of 45 ms, down from 46 ms last week. An important caveat: medians can be misleading! An API might have a fast median latency but produce many slow outliers. So just being fast isn’t everything. You have to be reliable too if you want to have good API ratings and get a high CASC score!

API Metrics: Worst Quality

Week Ending 15 February 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Nobody under 8.00!
COVID-19	covid19api.com	4.52
Search	Nobody under 8.00!
Social Networks	Nobody under 8.00!
UK Government	NHS	6.40
US Government	NASA	6.65
Messaging	Nobody under 8.00!	7.79

Coronavirus COVID19 API (cov19api.com) in the Covid-19 category takes the overall Wooden Spoon this week again with a CASC score of 4.52, down from 4.95 last week. Interestingly, four out of the seven API metrics categories don’t have an API that appears in the list because there is no API in that category outside the Green Zone. This is indicative of the general trend for API performance to improve over time. See you again in a week as we plunge ever deeper into February. Also don’t forget to look out for our monthly API metrics report for January and the weekly and monthly financial API reports. We will also be publishing special reports on the State of the APIs in the 2020, so that’s something else to look forward to!