Zapier Provides Outage Status Board for Nearly 200 APIs
For the general public, when an app or online service abruptly stops working, it just means they’ll have to go without Gmail or posting links on Twitter until the mysterious problem is resolved. But for developers whose apps rely on these services to function, it creates a more serious problem.
Developers could start frantically searching their own work, seeing if bad code is the issue, but that can take a lot of time and frustration—especially once it’s determined that the code is fine. Next is checking if there’s a failure with the API that lets the app tap into the service in question. There are API service dashboards that track the larger APIs, such as those for Google, Amazon, and Dropbox. But what if you’re working with one of the many smaller services increasingly being relied on—or, as is more often the case these days, working with several smaller services?
Zapier, a startup that automates tasks between APIs and online services, is sharing a solution with its API Status Board. Because Zapier offers integration between nearly 200 online services, the company says it performs millions of API requests a month to monitor uptimes and downtimes.
The results used to only be available internally, but the status board of Zapier’s entire service catalog is now accessible to the public for free in close to real time. (To be sure of the returning data, the dashboard runs on a delay of about five to ten minutes.) Still, Zapier co-founder and CEO Wade Foster told ProgrammableWeb, “[W]e typically catch outages even before vendors are reporting them.”
Zapier tracks the HTTP status codes for each request, and its dashboard indicates in an at-a-glance chart whether each API is running fine, is experiencing downtime (possibly Zapier-related or the result of user configuration), or is in the midst of a true outage.
In addition to going to the Zapier website for the API Status Board, there is a Twitter account automatically tweeting API issues, an RSS feed, and a JSON feed. Developers also can sign up to be alerted via email, SMS, and other messaging services when a particular API is experiencing issues, or they can integrate the dashboard with existing tools using Zapier’s API Status API, which runs on REST protocol and returns calls in a JSON data format.
