I have a vendor that sucks donkey balls. Their systems break often. An endpoint we rely on will start returning [] and take months to fix. They’ll change a data label in their backend and not notice that it flows into all of their filters and stuff.
I have some alerts when my consumers break, but I think I’d like something more direct. What’s the best way to monitor an external API?
I’m imagining some very basic ML that can pop up and tell me that something has changed, like there are more hosts or categories or whatever than usual, that a structure has gone blank or is missing, that some field has gone to 0 or null across the structure. Heck, that a field name has changed.
Is the best way to basically write tests for everything I can think of, and add more as things break, or is there a better tool? I see API monitoring tools but they are for calculating availability for your own APIs, not for enforcing someone else’s!
Preflight it? If you ask external API every 6 hours about known range of host IDs with a date, then 1h before you need that information call the external API and check if it works or returns garbage? That way you can get some extra time to maybe react earlier to an incident? It honestly depends on the nature of your job and the qualities of your traffic, but generally speaking the problem you have is unfixable and the best you can hope for is early detection (if that matters for you).
If however you’re a pass-through API to the external one, eg. a different service calls your API with a hostID and the hostIDs are not a known finite pool, then you can forget about preflighting.