API Ratings: Jan 5–12 | Messaging Latency

API Performance

Yes, dear reader, it’s still the first half of January 2021. But don’t fear, API.expert is still on the case with our weekly API ratings.

For our API ratings, we look at over 100 APIs and pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for the service quality for an organization’s APIs in a particular API ratings category with our patented CASC score.

Something of interest

We don’t usually look at the table of a category this way, but it can be illuminating to do.

Here we see the Messaging category by reverse Median Latency. The slowest API, Nexmo (REST) has a much better CASC score than the fastest API, Slack, which gets the wooden spoon in the category. Being fast is good – but being reliable is better.

Nexmo (REST) is a pretty slow API. North America is fastest region, but it’s still not fast. East and South Asia and Oceania are peculiar.

What’s the rate-determining step though? Actively monitoring your API from various cloud locations around the world lets you find that out.

Process Time is where we are seeing the bulk of the latency. That suggests that looking at what is happening on the server-side would be useful be identifying what could be optimized to improve the performance of the API.

Slack is not very different. North America is the fastest region by a long way in terms of Process Time. But the other regions are much slower, especially East and South Asia and Oceania.

For a global player like Slack this is potentially a significant issue. Do you really want your users in Bangalore to getting so much slower a service than in Baltimore? Does Slack even know that the performance in Brisbane is worse than in Boston?

Unless you are actively monitoring from the end-user perspective you aren’t going to really understand what your users are experiencing. And if you don’t understand that, someone who does might eat your lunch.

So get actively monitoring!

API Ratings: Overall Quality

Week Ending 11 January 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	GitHub	9.55
COVID-19	WHO	9.45
Search	Microsoft Bing	9.26
Social Networks	Google	9.51
UK Government	GOV.UK	9.65
US Government	Bureau of Labor Statistics	9.61
Messaging	Ring Central (Sandbox)	9.29

GOV.UK in the UK Government category takes the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.65. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional. Three of the six categories are headed by organization with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this 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 9.26 or more.

API Ratings: Top Performers by Latency

Week Ending 11 January 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Office	225 ms
COVID-19	WHO	83 ms
Search	Google	397 ms
Social Networks	Google	56 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	84 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	48 ms
Messaging	Slack	265 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 APIs and get a high CASC score!

API Ratings: Worst Quality

Week Ending 11 January 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Nobody under 8.00!
COVID-19	covid19api.com	5.52
Search	Nobody under 8.00!
Social Networks	Nobody under 8.00!
UK Government	NHS	6.19
US Government	NASA	6.57
Messaging	Slack	7.86

Coronavirus COVID19 API takes the overall Wooden Spoon this week with a CASC score of 5.52. See you again in a week as we head further into 2021. Also don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for December 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!

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