API monitoring and Observability for Backend Engineers

Hello “👋”

Welcome to another week, another opportunity to become a Great Backend Engineer.

Today’s issue is brought to you by Alerty.ai → Alerty helps you monitor performance and errors in your app so you can grow the number of users for your product.

Before we get down to the business of today. I have a special gift for you: You will love this one.

Building a backend system is hard.

However, what is more difficult is deploying the backend system and discovering after 5 days that it was down, either from users' emails or support tickets.

That was the case in one of my products.

Until I discovered a FREE tool that lets me monitor the status of different aspects of my application, including:

• My databases

• My Frontend

• My Backend business logic

• My Infrastructure

• etc

All in one place without paying a DIME.

Just click here to connect all your apps and get real-time alerts anytime something is wrong with your app.

Now, back to the business of today.

API monitoring saves the day.

As a developer, the real work begins once your API is live in production. You and your team must ask different questions, such as ensuring the API remains healthy. 

As the API serves millions of users worldwide, how do you anticipate problems or critical issues that can impair the application's functioning?

A simple API change can impact hundreds of internal API calls, creating issues ranging from data access at the back end to the end-user interacting with the application. How will your team anticipate, isolate, and resolve application issues before they become problematic for end-users and partners?

While there’s no straight way to identify and solve all these questions, teams can constantly monitor and observe their API while in production to gain useful and comprehensive insight into API usage, fail state points, etc.

Therefore, constantly monitoring and observing your API manually or automatically is called API Monitoring and Observability.

In the next section, we will explore API monitoring to understand the importance of monitoring your API to gain useful insight.

Overview of API Monitoring

API Monitoring involves tracking the performance of an API (Application Programming Interface) in real-time to ensure that it is functioning properly and meeting users' needs. This process involves monitoring the API’s performance metrics, such as response time, availability, and error rates. It also includes tracking the API’s usage and understanding how users use it. 

API Monitoring helps identify potential issues, allowing developers to address them quickly before they become major problems. 

Additionally, API Monitoring can be used to identify trends in API usage and better understand users' needs.

Ensuring that your applications are running smoothly and efficiently is also critical. It helps you identify any issues that may be occurring with your APIs and takes the necessary steps to fix them.

Furthermore, API monitoring can be done manually or with the help of a third-party service. Manual API monitoring involves manually checking the performance of your APIs regularly. This can be time-consuming and tedious, but it can be useful to identify any issues quickly.

This concept applies to the API you deployed. You can easily integrate tools or write code to report bugs, downtime, and performance issues to your email, Slack, or other mediums. You don’t have to check your production API for insights manually.

Now that you understand API monitoring, we will explore API Observability, its importance, and possibly the difference between API observability and API monitoring in the next section.

Overview of API Observability

API observability is a form of monitoring called white-box monitoring. It involves observing, identifying, and predicting possible occurrences in a system. It is a crucial element to effectively carrying out APIOps cycles.

To clearly understand the distinction between API monitoring and observability, you must answer a few questions about your API.

1. Does your API provide the functionality they were designed to deliver?

2. Does your API provide the optimum performance for the users?

3. Is your API secured against threats and attacks?

4. How are users consuming your API?

To answer these questions, you will explore different methods to observe your API in production first before concluding to answer those questions. We call that API Observability.

According to Mosif, traditional monitoring focuses on the “known unknown” metrics, meaning that monitoring focuses on the metrics that you already know but don’t know the values or results yet—for example, requests per Second or Errors Per Second, etc. While the metric value may be unknown beforehand, you already know what to measure. 

However, that is not the case in Observability because API observability focuses on the “unknown unknowns” metric. This means that you need to observe as much as possible the internal workings of a system from its outputs by inferring state and behavior so that you can answer any arbitrary question about your API behavior, not just a few predefined metrics that are directly measurable.

In addition, you can use API Observability to understand more deeply how your API-driven applications work and properly rectify issues that might impact the entire API's availability, performance, and security.

We have explored the importance of API observability to developers and engineering teams. In the next section, we will explore an API monitoring and observability tool that handles and automates these processes for you and your team.

Selecting an API Monitoring Tool

Various tools are available to handle your API monitoring needs. Therefore, selecting an API monitoring tool that best fits your team’s needs is a tough choice. However, selecting an API Monitoring solution that can provide actionable data is essential to increase your ROI and get useful performance data.

When choosing an API monitoring solution, it’s important to keep these functionalities in mind:

• Easy to understand & Intuitive: You need to choose a tool that is easy to understand and set up by your team. You won’t be able to utilize the full potential of any tool if you don’t understand it or if it’s difficult to use. Therefore, finding an API monitoring tool that is easy to use and intuitive will reduce your ramp-up time and increase the probability of your reliance on the tool. 

• Customizable, Collaboration, and Shareable: You need to choose a product that allows you to customize the dashboard and see different API analytics and metrics. It should also be a tool that allows team collaboration and the generation and sharing of reports.

• Adaptable: Make sure to choose a tool that is adaptable, flexible, and easy to customize so it can easily fit into your stack and your team’s preferences.

• Alerts: Alerts are crucial and, most of the time, the essence of monitoring. Make sure to choose a tool that allows you to create alerts and events based on the results of monitoring your API.

• Sequencing and Assertions: Make sure you choose an API monitoring tool that allows you to add assertions and validate the data the API returns. This is an essential functionality for any API monitoring tool.

If you apply the listed functionalities when choosing an API monitoring solution, you will be well on your way to choosing the right tool.

List of Monitoring and Observability Tools

1. APIToolkit → Observe, Debug & Test backend systems or any third-party APIs.

2. Alerty → Alerty helps you monitor app performance and errors so you can attract more users to your product.

3. Sentry → Sentry’s full-stack monitoring gives you full visibility into your code.

4. Datadog → For comprehensive monitoring, logging, and analytics.

5. Treble → Is a lightweight SDK that helps Engineering and Product teams build, ship & maintain REST-based APIs faster.

6. Grafana → For real-time dashboards.

7. Prometheus → For metrics collection and alerting.

That will be all for this week. I like to keep this newsletter short.

This is from the API and API Design series for backend engineers. You can bookmark it for further reading.

Don’t miss it. Share with a friend

Did you learn any new things from this newsletter this week? Please reply to this email and let me know. Feedback like this encourages me to keep going.

See you on Next Week.

Remember to get BoilerPro now → Production-ready Next.js and AWS-based SaaS boilerplate, which is all you need to launch your next startup quickly.

Top 5 Remote Backend Jobs this week

Here are the top 5 Backend Jobs you can apply to now.

👨‍💻 Oowlish Technology
✍️ Backend Developer - Nodejs
📍Remote
💰 Click on Apply for salary details
Click here to Apply for this role.

👨‍💻 Oowlish Technology
✍️ Backend / API Engineer, Issuing
📍Remote, Canada
💰 Click on Apply for salary details
Click here to Apply for this role.

👨‍💻 Arista Networks
✍️ Backend Engineer, AdTech
📍Remote, Germany
💰 Click on Apply for salary details
Click here to Apply for this role.

👨‍💻Sandman Media Inc
✍️ Full stack PHP Developer
📍Remote, Africa
💰 Click on Apply for salary details
Click here to Apply for this role.

Want more Remote Backend Jobs? Visit GetBackendJobs.com

GBE Podcast

In this week’s episode of the Great Backend Engineer (GBE) podcast, I sat down with Johnny Dallas to discuss building better software using internal tools.

Watch on Youtube (subscribe):

Spotify:

Apple Podcast:

Backend Engineering Resources

1. Backend Engineering Hub

2. All Backend Books

3. Visit our Backend Store

4. Join our Community

5. Backend Engineering Courses

6. Great Backend Engineering Podcast

LAST WORD 👋 

How am I doing?

I love hearing from readers, and I'm always looking for feedback. How am I doing with The Backend Weekly? Is there anything you'd like to see more or less of? Which aspects of the newsletter do you enjoy the most?

Hit reply and say hello - I'd love to hear from you!

Stay awesome,
Solomon

I moved my newsletter from Substack to Beehiiv, and it's been an amazing journey. Start yours here.