All APIs must have comprehensive observability including monitoring, logging, health checks, and alerting, with defined SLIs and SLOs that ensure teams can proactively detect, diagnose, and resolve issues before they impact consumers.
APIs Are Observable and Monitored
Policies
Monitoring (Operations)
Require that every API is actively monitored for availability, latency, error rates, and traffic, so I want the golden signals collected, dashboarded, and wired to alerts before an API ever reaches...
Logging (Operations)
Require that every API produces structured, correlated logs for each request, so I want a consistent log schema, a correlation or trace identifier carried through, and clear rules about what gets c...
Health Checks (Operations)
Require that every API exposes a standard health check endpoint, so I want a predictable path that reports liveness and readiness along with the status of critical dependencies. I insist on this be...
Status
Making an API status page, monitoring reports, or other real-time updates regarding the uptime and availability of an API, providing current, but also the historical status of API, helping maintain...
Status Dashboard
Require a link to as well as results from a status dashboard for an API.
Status History
Require a link to as well as results from a status history for an API.
Performance
Publishing details regarding the performance of APIs, complimenting status and uptime information, but drilling into more detail regarding speed, latency, and other performance related metrics that...
Latency
Requiring details regarding the regular latency for each available API.
Response Time
Requiring details regarding the regular response time for each available API.
Experiences
Reliability
If an API isn’t reliable, consumers will eventually look for alternatives. Reliability starts with the platform and infrastructure where the API is deployed, but it also depends heavily on the pace...
Quality
The quality of HTTP APIs powering an enterprise tends to decline as the number of ungoverned APIs grows across internal, partner, and public landscapes. Low-quality APIs lead to poor downstream exp...
Trust
Establish trust with API consumers will evolve and build over time, and is something that can be lost in a very short period of time. Trust will depend on other experiences like quality and reliabi...
Observability
Observability is the experience of being able to see what an API is actually doing in production. Logging, monitoring, analytics, and tracing turn an opaque running system into something teams can ...
Performance
Performance is the experience of how fast and consistently an API responds under real-world conditions. Latency, throughput, and predictability directly shape how consumers perceive an API and whet...
