It may be summer, but API performance observation, verification and governance never takes a break - and neither do we here at APImetrics. Let's take a look at whose API performance was down and out for the last week.
Vonage API performance took a nosedive - in the Corporate Messaging collection it decreased by 14% from 9.56 (in the Green Zone) to 8.2 (in the Green Zone).
This was due to quite a jump in their DNS lookup times affecting all monitored endpoints. They rose from around 30-40ms to over 100ms between the 21st and 23rd of the month and have not yet recovered. Their DNS appears to be provided by Cloudflare. Wonder what happened?
Next up is poor API performance from an entity from whom we don't hear a lot. Sainsbury's Bank in the Open Banking UK Production collection decreased by 10% from 9.33 (in the Green Zone) to 8.36 (in the Green Zone).
This was due to a large number of HTTP 500 Internal Server Error responses on late on the 22nd moving into the 23rd of June, as well as a few scattered throughout the week. This seems to have affected only their OAuth endpoint and appears to be unplanned as there was no mention of any planned outage in the Open Banking downtime tracker.
Transparency is key! Let your users and your third-party partners know when you're not getting a perfect score on your API calls - and let them know when it's all fixed as well.
NASA in the US Government collection decreased by 15% from 4.78 (in the Red Zone) to 4.02 (in the Red Zone). This is what's known in the biz as going from bad to worse.
This is due to an increase in latency affecting the NASA APOD endpoint (pink). This increase also included a large number of HTTP 504 Gateway Timeout failures. Interestingly, not involved really in the CASC score drop, the NASA asteroids endpoint seems to oscillate between high latency (nearly 6000ms) to (relatively) low latency (only around 1250ms) every few days.
You knew it was coming: US Dept of Energy API Performance Update
Another week, another weary sigh. Dept of Energy in the US Government collection was in the Red Zone with a CASC score of 3.22.
Maybe we are starting to get somewhere? We are eternal optimists.
Standard deviation is down 30% and the outlier rate is now 5.14% points less than last week, sitting at 39.2% outliers. Still a long way to go though.