API Metrics: Feb 2–9 | GitHub & Pager Duty

Something of interest in this week’s API metrics

Corporate Infrastructure is a pretty competitive API metrics category, with all APIs in the Green Zone and 9 out of 19 having a CASC score of over 9.00.

If we look at outliers, we see there is a pretty large between the best performer, GitHub, with just 0.48% outliers, which comes top overall in terms of CASC score, and Pager Duty with 4.87% outliers – ten times as many. The seven best APIs in terms of outliers all have a CASC API metrics score of 9.18 or higher.

We can see that though there are variations between regions, GitHub is pretty consistent within regions. There is only a 19 ms variation in Europe and 16 ms one in South America, the slowest region. Consistency is the goal and if you can achieve that you will get a good CASC score.

PagerDuty is a slower API overall, but there is also a lot more variation in latency: 187 ms in Europe, 314 ms in South America. North America has a variation of 116 ms. For GitHub, only East Asia has a bigger variation than that at 177 ms.

We see here the difference between a good API and a very good one. And this is why you need to be actively monitoring your APIs from the locations your users are using them from.

You want to be quick everywhere, but you – and your users – also want you to have consistent API metrics.

API Metrics: Tops in Overall Quality

Week Ending 9 February 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	GitHub	9.61
COVID-19	ubentos.com	9.56
Search	Google	9.45
Social Networks	Google	9.60
UK Government	GOV.UK	9.71
US Government	Department of Justice	9.87
Messaging APIs	Nexmo (API)	9.28

Department of Justice in the US Government category takes the overall API metrics title this week with a CASC score of 9.87. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional. Five of the seven 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, all seven categories are topped by an API with a CASC score of 9.28 or more.

API Metrics: Top Performers by Latency

Week Ending 9 February 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Office	223 ms
COVID-19	WHO	87 ms
Search	Google	391 ms
Social Networks	Google	57 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 takes the overall title again with a median latency of 46 ms down from 48 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 9 February 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Nobody under 8.00!
COVID-19	covid19api.com	4.95
Search	Nobody under 8.00!
Social Networks	Nobody under 8.00!
UK Government	NHS	6.15
US Government	General Services Administration	6.60
Messaging	Twilio	7.79

Coronavirus COVID19 API (cov19api.com) in the Covid-19 category takes the overall Wooden Spoon this week with a CASC score of 4.95, up from 4.92. See you again in a week as we steam even further into February. Also don’t forget to look out for our monthly 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!

Do more with API monitoring!

If you are new to APImetrics, sign up for a free trial so see how they could work for you with our free API set.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.