API monitoring is critical to offering your customers a flawless user experience. But it can be difficult to find a wide range of best practices in one place. Consider this your guide to API monitoring. Check out all the latest best practices for API monitoring with BlazeMeter, as well as links to our complete documentation.
Read along or jump to the section that interests you most:
Health Check API
As a part of health checks, it is important to do API Monitoring for many reasons such as identifying issues, covering your testing bases and ensuring customers satisfaction, among others. There are three fundamental areas where API monitors perform a health check for: Uptime, Performance and Correctness.
BlazeMeter makes it easy to adopt API monitoring best practices, like health check API. One advantage of using BlazeMeter is the ability to monitor your APIs from multiple sources around the globe.
Furthermore, using your JMeter performance metrics and system health KPIs, BlazeMeter helps you analyze your load test results and pinpoint the underlying issues with a guide for monitoring server health metrics.
Back to topAPI Monitoring Tools
As API becomes a key element of customer experience, the importance of continuous API monitoring becomes more evident. As part of our unification with Runscope, BlazeMeter offers enhanced API Testing and Monitoring within the BlazeMeter workspace. This will give developers and testers full access to testing their applications, both pre-production and post-production.
Runscope will allow you to prevent, identify and solve APIs problems before your customers notice. You can create an API Monitoring Test, handle your team, notifications and buckets more efficiently, among other features.
In addition to this, you can build Webhook listeners on Slack with BlazeMeter API Monitoring.
Back to topAPI Monitoring Security
Security is a priority when it comes to API Monitoring. Securing your data is a highly recommended best practice, even when talking about test data. It can be accessed by third-parties and we want to avoid that. Know how to secure your valuables or use clients certificates based authentication with BlazeMeter API Monitoring.
We often use sensitive test data that we do not want to share with others. Some common examples can be using an API key or an access token. Teams can rely on BlazeMeter’s Secrets Management to secure their test data, working at team and bucket levels.
It is also possible to strengthen the security for Client Certificates in BlazeMeter. Customers APIs not only require client certificates, but also an additional key file or passphrase. For that, we have enhanced the PEM-encoded Client Certificates based authentication for API Monitoring Tests to also accept a key file or a passphrase.
Back to topAPI Testing
API testing not only detects failures on the API but also on other components of the system leading your tests to have greater coverage. In this section, we’ll walk you through the most relevant API Testing best practices.
What is API Testing?
API testing and API monitoring are two essential processes of software quality assurance. These ensure that an API is doing what it is supposed to and fulfills the API customer’s expectations. It is important to know the difference between testing and monitoring when it comes to API and have a strategy for both as part of your development cycle.
Continuous Testing With BlazeMeter API Monitoring
BlazeMeter API Monitoring is a great addition to a Continuous Testing strategy. It goes great in combination with Load and Performance Testing. Check the status of your API, validate Data and Complex API Workflow. Work as a team without the need of changing between multiple tools and ensure a great API experience around the globe with our 19 different locations.
Continuous API Testing will test APIs both pre-production and post-production (shift right testing). API testing can be created before development is complete and the tests that you have created can be used to monitor your API because testing doesn’t stop once we hit production. With BlazeMeter you can run your API tests by: simply creating it within the UI, toggling to add your own script in Taurus or you can import from file types like JMeter and Swagger. As a part of the continuous testing strategy, you can shift-right API monitoring to check the performance in a production environment.
Combine API Testing With Mock Services
Along with the continuous API Testing, BlazeMeter’s users are able to create a mock service from the response to a BlazeMeter API Monitoring (Runscope) test. You can make additional modifications to this Mock Service either via API or from the Mock Services tab within BlazeMeter. Mock API for testing is very useful when you are running tests and certain services are not available.
Create API Assertions
A key part of API testing is using API assertions to ensure your APIs are up, fast and returning the expected data. You can either make assertions on the Assertions tab or you can use BlazeMeter’s Script Engine to execute custom JavaScript code before or after request steps. Assertions can be included in post-response scripts.
Set Up API Test Notifications
To wrap things up, BlazeMeter email notification allows you to add distribution lists as a “team member” to receive API test notifications. Also, it’s possible to send them to distribution lists and non-member emails.
Back to topAPI Monitoring Resources
In this section, we dive into some of the most relevant topics related to API monitoring resources for BlazeMeter users. Keep your APIs secure, create and manage teams, and get started with monitoring a SOAP API.
API Monitoring Security with BlazeMeter helps ensure that your data is safe, secure, and available only to authorized users. Your data will be completely inaccessible to anyone else, unless you explicitly choose to share that data with the public. That’s why API Monitoring security with BlazeMeter is the best option.
Through API Monitoring Teams in BlazeMeter you and your team are able to share your buckets and request data across a group of people.
Runscope API Monitoring is an excellent resource for API Monitoring as it allows BlazeMeter users to create tests, work with Script Engine, handle notifications, monitor your APIs, manage Teams and Buckets and much more.
SOAP/WSDL API monitoring with BlazeMeter helps you to test a SOAP API that returns geolocation information based on an IP address, validates its response using assertions and post-response scripts. You will not only see your SOAP API working, but will also ensure that the response is returning the correct data. Additionally, BlazeMeter helps you to create tests with the Traffic Inspector.