Paul co-founded APIContext (formerly APImetrics), building the synthetic monitoring and conformance testing platform from its earliest days.
We look at over 100 APIs and pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for the service quality by way of API ratings in a particular category with a patented CASC score. Scroll down to see more1 But first:
Something of interest
Microsoft Office is a pretty strong API and, in particularly usually tops the API ratings category for Median Latency. It’s quite a competitive category in terms of median latency, so being able to sustain the API ratings edge for an extended period is a good effort. Azure is the fastest cloud in our API ratings for every region except Oceania, where AWS is better by 6 ms. Microsoft are likely to be satisfied that their own infrastructure is delivering in general. But they might want to have a look at what is going on in Oceania. This is why it is so important to active monitor your API from the end-user’s perspective. It is easy to lull yourself into a false sense of security that everything is going well - when there might be a group of users who are not getting the performance they deserve or are losing out altogether. DNS Lookup Time should typically be 4 ms everywhere. Microsoft Office manages this in all regions except South America. But any users from Google and IBM Cloud in North America or IBM Cloud in Oceania are going to get a nasty hit from DNS, one that isn’t needed. A slow region or cloud won’t affect the overall median latency as far as our API ratings go, but it will affect the users in that region or cloud. That’s why you been to break things down to get to the granularity that tells you how the API is really behaving. Azure is again fastest for all regions for Handshake Time, but there’s a nasty surprise for AWS users in South America. That’s the kind of surprise that might not be your fault, but for which you might get the blame. Obviously, Microsoft probably would prefer that applications calling the MS APIs are built on the Azure stack, but this is something to be aware of because that will not always be possible.
Top API Ratings: Overall quality
Week Ending 10 November 2020
Category
Organization
CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure
GitHub
9.52
COVID-19
ECDC
See what your APIs look like from the outside.
APIContext gives engineering, product, and customer success teams a shared view of API reliability, conformance, and customer impact — without rebuilding dashboards.
