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
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