API Metrics: Jan 25–Feb 1 | Google Oceania

Something of interest

Social Networks is a pretty competitive category for API metrics, which is not surprising given the centrality of social networks in contemporary life. Six out of 10 APIs have a CASC score over 9.00, and all but one have a CASC score of 8.52 or more and thus firmly in the Green Zone. Only Reddit is languishing in the Amber Zone this week.

Twitter takes the API metrics title this week with a CASC score of 9.60, only 0.02 points ahead of Google, which actually has a better pass rate, outliers and median latency, so it is the standard deviation that’s pulling it down.

What’s going on there?

Straightaway, we can see a glaring issue. The slowest location is Google Oceania. Oceania locations often can be slow because of the region’s location, but AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud are about three times faster than Google for Google’s own API here, so something is definitely amiss.

Google in South Asia and North America are blisteringly fast with median latencies of 26 ms and 27 ms respectively and Europe not far behind at 30 ms. So South America, South Asia and, especially, Oceania, are badly out of kilter.

This is why you need to monitor your APIs actively because if you aren’t you don’t what kinds of problems your users are experiencing – and where those problems arise so that you can see straightaway where to start fixing them.

A look at Process Time immediately tells us where the problem is with Google in South America, South Asia and Oceania. For other clouds, Process Time is fast, just as we would expect for a quick API.

Indeed, Process Time shouldn’t typically depend on location unless there is a load-balancing architecture with multiple data centers. But there is very clearly something wrong if Google is picking up a whole 300 ms of extra latency because of the Process Time component (and tens of milliseconds in South America and East Asia).

Whether the problem is in fact with a network configuration (internal tromboning perhaps) or whether it is something to do with the local backends in those regions, this definitely needs resolving in order to make the Google Social Networks API the best it can be.

API Metrics: Overall Quality

Week Ending 1 February 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	GitHub	9.59
COVID-19	ubentos.com	9.53
Search	Microsoft Bing	9.34
Social Networks	Twitter	9.60
UK Government	GOV.UK	9.71
US Government	Bureau of Labor Statistics	9.81
Messaging APIs	Zoom	9.13

Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US Government category takes the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.81. 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.Five 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, six out of seven categories are topped by an API with a CASC score of 9.34 or more.

API Metrics: Top Performers by Latency

Week Ending 1 February 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Office	222 ms
COVID-19	WHO	82 ms
Search	Google	382 ms
Social Networks	Google	56 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	83 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	82 ms
Messaging APIs	Slack	268 ms

Department of Justice in the US Government takes the overall title again with a median latency of 48 ms, the same as 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 1 February 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Nobody under 8.00!
COVID-19	covid-api.com	4.92
Search	Nobody under 8.00!
Social Networks	Reddit	7.14
UK Government	NHS	6.35
US Government	General Services Administration	5.65
Messaging	RingCentral (Sandbox)	7.16

COVID-19 Statistics API (covid-api.com) in the Covid-19 category takes the overall Wooden Spoon this week with a CASC score of 4.92. See you again in a week as we delve deeper 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 2020, so that’s something else to look forward to!

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