The reality of modern apps is that what a user sees is an entirely different story than what goes on behind the scenes. In an ideal world, they would have a seamless digital experience and walk away from an online purchase or interaction feeling happy with their experience and therefore the business at hand. That said, these supposedly simple transactions or interactions can involve countless interdependent internal and external departments working together, often via the Internet, to execute an application's workflow. About the Author Ian Waters is a Senior Marketing Manager for EMEA at ThousandEyes. The explosion of advances in technology such as the Internet, cloud computing, and mobile devices in recent times has led to a paradigm shift in application architectures. Such architectures became more modular and service-based as opposed to the previously monolithic format, where a single piece of code would support multiple modules and functionality. As a result, they now rely on many external third-party services, backend integrations, and cloud APIs. While this offers significant advantages in terms of scale and cutting-edge functionality, a precise upgrade for today's always-on world, it also brings a level of difficulty that can make identification and tracking difficult. To optimize the delivery of these digital experiences, organizations must understand how APIs work. With this in mind, it is essential to understand the accessibility of APIs on the Internet and in cloud provider networks.
Lack of visibility adds a layer of complexity
The increasingly complex nature of workflows can often make attempts to find a snag turn into a haystack, and the time-consuming nature of this challenge can affect companies. When users suffer from their ability to access an app, it has a direct effect on their digital experience, which they would naturally now view as negative. For any business where an application is the first port of call for service customers, this can be detrimental. An end user who has trouble accessing an application, after all, will have no reason not to think that the problem is in the application itself, even if the problem is on the Internet. These kinds of issues can affect a company at the employee level as well: workers struggling to access their key Software as a Service applications may be pointing the finger at their IT admin team, when the issue really is at hand. some point in between. and the application they are trying to access. While older application and network monitoring tools have their uses in addressing these hurdles, they lack the level of visibility needed to monitor the distributed interdependencies of the modern application and effectively find the issue, then scale and fix the issue in flows. of external work. Due to this lack of visibility, the delivery path is often a blind spot for companies, preventing them from truly understanding the root cause of any issues their users may be experiencing. In addition to this, digitally driven companies need to understand any issues outside of their IT infrastructure in order to gather evidence of the issue before they can pursue third-party action. Companies can lose precious time without this patent trying to solve the problem, while their users suffer from a bad digital experience. The delivery pipelines themselves can present a further hurdle by being often complex and lacking in stability in the cloud, with third-party APIs and data centers moving around frequently or even disappearing altogether. All of these factors can have a huge impact on how an application works, further highlighting the need not only for visibility, but also for tools to troubleshoot.
Go beyond traditional surveillance
Certain organizations will naturally turn to synthetic browser monitoring tools. While this is a powerful way to continuously test key user workflows in your application, certain browser-related user requests are based on multiple backend API interactions that are too complex to handle. Be perceptible from the user's perspective. For example, when a user submits an order form on an online commerce site, the application makes a series of API calls to check inventory, process payment, and produce an order number, before going to the store. User to an order confirmation page. Since these backend services are invisible to the user, monitoring tools will not ultimately notice a failure or performance issue in any of them, but will always have a direct impact on the user. So what is the solution? Companies need to be able to test external APIs at a granular level from the context of their primary application, not just through front-end interaction. In addition to this, they need to be able to understand the impact of latent network transport, typically an ISP or cloud network.
A new solution for application owners
Enter accommodative API monitoring. Responsive API monitoring allows organizations to go beyond mimicking user interactions through a user-facing site to executing API calls directly to their API dependencies. Its highly flexible synthetic testing framework emulates the conditional interactions of the backend application with the API endpoints. It is essential to take into consideration that with API monitoring, tests can be executed from points of view external to the application environment or from agents located in the application hosting environment to the services. API. The advantages of the latter mean that particular network paths from the application to the API endpoints can also be monitored. Application owners can measure performance, distinguish delays between each iterative function, and validate the logic of complex workflows. All of this allows for quick confirmation of issues in a workflow, as well as insight into potential opportunities for optimization. With APIs becoming an increasingly essential part of today's modern applications, it is essential that a wide range of companies understand the accessibility of APIs on the Internet and cloud vendor networks. It is this visibility that will allow them to gain insight into the performance of their application as a whole, and in turn ensure a smooth and positive digital experience for the end user.