A comparison of the many API monitoring solutions on the market.

API monitoring is a vital part of API maintenance as well as API security. When an API developer pushes the API on the production server, it becomes available to many consumers. These consumers will further use the API data for analytics, automation, or to feed into other systems. Being a developer, you don’t want these consumers to face downtime. You especially don’t want API attacks to impact end consumers negatively.

To ensure high-quality integrations, you really need an API monitoring process to ensure performance, ability, and accuracy. API monitoring tools help monitor your API and provide in-depth analysis and measurement. Below, we’ve reviewed some of the most popular API monitoring options. These tools can help you maintain your APIs and improve poorly performing endpoints.

Why Is API Monitoring Important?

• API monitoring can measure the availability of an API. You can use these tools to check when an API went down and calculate the uptime of the API.
• API monitoring can calculate the performance of an API. API monitoring tools will identify the response time and latency for each API call. This will help you check which endpoint is taking more time than the others and improve them.

New Relic

New Relic is one of the most popular and comprehensive cloud-based API monitoring tools. Many DevOps and software teams use it to monitor APIs as well as the database transactions in the API, database queries, resource loading, and more.

New Relic also allows you to create custom dashboards, notifications, performance analysis, and event logs. All the data is captured and displayed graphically. This API monitoring tool also supports real-time monitoring, which helps to debug issues without any delay.

Pros

• Provides in-depth data.
• Graphical UI
• Custom alerts

Cons

• Slow website
• Steep learning curve

AWS Cloudwatch

Cloudwatch is a monitoring tool from Amazon that helps DevOps, developers, and non-technical people understand, monitor, and report the API performance. It provides monitoring data with actionable items, which saves time to make decisions in case of failure.

Cloudwatch collects the data in the form of logs, metrics, events, failures and processes them. The processed data is displayed in a graphical interface. It also lets you track all the AWS services used by your application so that you can have an idea of what went wrong and what needs to be fixed.

Pros

• Cost is low when compared to other monitoring tools.
• Automates the collection of AWS service logs.
• Very easy to install on an EC2 machine.
• It can be integrated with almost all AWS services.

Cons:

• It can only be used with AWS services.
• Dashboard needs to be more interactive and comprehensive.

Sematext Synthetics

Sematext Synthetics uses HTTP monitors to track the API availability from different geo-locations. It is a straightforward API monitoring tool and is used to monitor the API uptime. This tool doesn’t provide in-depth data of the logs like the other tools but is very user-friendly.

Sematext Synthetics also allows you to set custom alerts that will be delivered to your Slack, email, etc. This API monitoring tool can be very easily integrated with the Sematext Cloud, which monitors the applications’ backend. This combination could be helpful to find out how the API and its backend are performing when pinged from different geo-locations.

Pros:

• Custom alerts
• Cheaper than most of the API monitoring tools
• Provides location-based data

Cons:

• It doesn’t provide the functionalities like the other API monitoring tools if used separately.

ManageEngine Applications Manager

This API performance monitoring software provides deep insights into the performance and user experience for the API and its infrastructure components. It also helps you to resolve the performance across the complete application stack.

The tool can catch the issue from the URL of the API endpoint to the line of code causing the issue. It can work on any cloud platform like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. It can easily detect the downtime, lags, outages, other bottlenecks and display them in a very friendly UI with suggested solutions.

Pros

• The tool is powerful and provides deep information about issues
• Supports other monitoring like Database monitoring, Container monitoring
• It comes with an Advanced Analytics system with 500+ inbuilt reports for data analysis

Cons

• Documentation is not very extensive.

Dotcom-Monitor

Dotcom-Monitor is another API monitoring solution that can also be used for load/stress testing of an API to ensure the availability, functionality, and uptime. When it was launched, it only provided the service for API monitoring, but later on, more tools were being added, such as load testing and real-time monitoring.

It also allows you to set up custom alerts for downtimes and performance issues. Dotcom-Monitor can also be used for website testing with the help of browser emulation.

Pros

• Very easy to use.
• Wide range of monitoring

Cons

• Setup is complex

Loggly

Loggly is a log data management solution that is used for API management. It helps to capture a deep log of API performance and display it graphically. Loggly is a managed service, meaning you wouldn’t have to buy a separate server to use this API monitoring tool.

Loggly comes with a wide variety of tools that you can use to analyze the log data and make decisions based on the data. It can be easily integrated with Slack to send alert messages, which come out to be very handy in case of failure.

Pros

• It allows you to check the data graphically
• Comes with an array of tools
• Real-time log data

Cons

• Depending on the plan, there are some restrictions on the log data size
• Expensive compared to other options
• There’s a steep learning curve for non-technical people

AppDynamics

AppDynamics is a full-stack monitoring tool that is used to monitor APIs owned by Cisco. It helps to prevent performance issues by monitoring the infrastructure and the technology stack of an API.

AppDynamics helps to understand what exactly is causing the issue and suggests possible solutions. It comes with a unified monitoring system that provides data like Browser Real User Monitoring, Mobile RUM, Synthetic Monitoring, Database Monitoring, etc.

Pros

• Custom Dashboards
• Capable to monitor microservices
• Schedule reports
• Comes with a free version also

Cons

• Expensive tool (if you go for the paid plan)
• It could be an overkill for small APIs

Moesif

Moesif is one of the most advanced API monitoring tools available right now, and it is being used by some big names like Oyo, Ups, Deloitte, etc. It provides instant API usage and failures with meaningful insights.

It empowers the API team with detailed insights about the API, which can help them to improve the API performance and resolve bugs in the API. It uses a user-centric data model that enables developers to update the API as per the company’s business needs.

By monitoring live API traffic for irregularities, Moesif prevents minor issues from becoming significant outages. A simple SDK can be used to detect unusual behavior.

Pros:

• Real-time API monitoring.
• Easily detect API security threats.
• Amazing support.
• Easy set-up and integration.

Cons:

• You need to pay to export data from it.

APImetrics

APImetrics is another real-time API monitoring tool that offers an analytics-driven API performance solution built specifically for the enterprise. It provides monitoring, testing, and performance analysis of Application Programming Interfaces. APImetrics helps businesses understand how APIs work in the field and how they contribute to the bottom line.

Using APImetrics, you can monitor from more than 80 locations and get real-time alerts directly within tools such as email, Pager Duty, and others. APImetrics offers deep insight into the operation and integration of essential APIs, microservices, web services, and other systems.

Pros:

• Easy to set up.
• Real-time monitoring.
• Offers 80+ locations for API testing and monitoring.

Runscope

Runscope, now part of BlazeMeter, is an API monitoring tool that uses exceptional API performance monitoring and powerful debugging tools that help developers and testers quickly solve API problems.

It is best suited for the developer community that makes and coordinates APIs, just as the QA and testing community that guarantees that APIs and integrations are working and performing appropriately. Moreover, Runscope can test services in the public cloud, those running on private organizations, or even in a local environment.

Pros:

• Runscope helps you to handle your APIs effectively.
• Easy to use UI.
• No install needed- runs on the cloud.
• Run tests from multiple locations across the globe.

Cons:

• The user interface is not mobile device-friendly.
• Runscope’s pricing is pretty steep.
• There are not many options for scalability.

APIscience

APIscience can help keep track of a web API’s health, availability, and performance and alerts you when something goes wrong. The monitors are simple to set up, and you can build multiple-step monitors in a short amount of time.

APIscience was developed with the sole purpose of supporting and monitoring REST-based API services. You can expect a quality UI and quick access to analytics from the reporting dashboard. APIscience monitors the APIs from several locations worldwide and informs you on how they are doing in various places.

Pros:

• It helps in the management of the API supply chain.
• Full-stack API control with easy and flexible pricing
• JSON, REST, XML, and Oauth are all supported.

Assertible

Assertible is one of the most user-friendly API monitoring tools available. It gives you a fast and easy way to keep track of your web services. It can keep API tests up to date with the new changes in the specification automatically.

The platform can be used by all types of companies, including SMEs, to monitor the quality of their web services and formulate strategies to enhance them. Assertible can generate simple but powerful assertions that can be used to track and measure the consistency of your APIs and websites.

Pros:

• Assertible provides a platform that allows users to keep track of their web service deployments.
• It helps users to gain a better understanding of the health of their website’s services. It will assist you in reducing the number of web bugs in your applications. It allows users to test their deployments and environments.

Cons:

• Not as suitable for viewing detailed reports of web services.

Rapidspike

Rapidspike is an innovative website monitoring framework that uses a single dashboard to track performance, uptime, and user journeys. It keeps track of everything from the perspective of your customers. Rapidspike helps monitor and understand each customer interaction. Competitor analysis, content management, problem area alerts, performance metrics, and maintenance schedules are all available via this online Website Monitoring system.

Pros:

• Customizable
• A wide variety of monitoring tools are available
• It helps in monitoring customer’s digital experience
• It offers a low-cost service that is important for monitoring and maintaining websites

Cons:

• The user interface may be a bit hard for some
• It takes some time to navigate between all the options
• The number of monitoring options makes license management a little complicated

Datadog

Datadog is a monitoring, security, and analytics platform for developers, IT operations teams, security engineers, and business users. It gives visibility into a dynamic, large-scale infrastructure.

Datadog a common cloud-scale monitoring service. This platform’s primary goal is to assist IT managers and app operations specialists in monitoring the performance of their applications, tools, and networks. The capabilities of Datadog are provided by a SaaS-based data analytics platform that allows multiple teams to collaborate on infrastructure issues.

Pros:

• Simple and easy-to-use UI
• Bunch of features available
• The filter functionality is awesome, allowing you to filter out errors for analysis easily
• It allows integration with other apps to increase productivity

Cons:

• Setting it up for the first time is a little difficult
• If you deal with a complex database system, monitoring can take more time.

AlertSite

AlertSite, from SmartBear, is another reliable and user-friendly platform for monitoring APIs, web applications, and mobile devices both within and outside the firewall. It helps you monitor and control proactively from an autonomous network of over 340 monitoring nodes located worldwide.

AlertSite assists you in detecting problems and performance bottlenecks before they affect your clients and company. If something goes wrong, AlertSite sends robust warnings to the right person. Companies worldwide use AlertSite to monitor and alert on SLAs, guaranteeing that all terms of the agreement are met.

Pros:

• Very affordable
• Great customer support
• Performance bottlenecks alerts in real-time
• Amazing and interactive user interface

Cons:

• It does not allow the execution of synthetic scripts from the Internet Explorer browser
• Location monitoring will be challenging

Postman

Postman is a powerful tool for manually checking APIs, tracking them, and even sharing API information around a team. Postman is used by over 7 million developers and 300,000+ businesses around the world.

Postman is already part of many developer workflows and has many features that make it a helpful API testing tool. Perhaps the tool’s most valuable feature is that it allows you to build a compilation of integration tests. The Postman command-line tool, the Postman API, the API Network, and integrations are all available via Postman.

Pros:

• Easy to set up and use
• You can create/import/export APIs collection with just a few clicks
• It provides a great framework to write automated tests for software
• Easy to switch between different modes like JSON or XML

Cons:

• Sometimes, the software reverts the changes on its own
• Limited to REST API Testing
• No support for Hessian protocol
• It is not possible to test more than 1 API simultaneously

API Fortress

As we’ve covered before, API Fortress is a powerful tool for testing and monitoring APIs. API Fortress is labeled as a testing tool as well as an API health tool, suggesting an emphasis on production reliability and monitoring.

API Fortress encourages each organization to simplify continuous API quality, allowing developers and test engineers to reduce time-to-market while reducing risk. API Fortress supports SOAP, REST, XML, JSON, and many other technologies. API Fortress is one of the most feature-rich platforms available, with versatile cloud deployment options, advanced API debugging tools, and data-driven testing capabilities.

Pros:

• The automatic generated code function is beneficial
• Being able to test and customize API Fortress for key data simultaneously
• User-friendly UI
• It provides a detailed report of the API testings

Bearer

Bearer is another one of the best developer tools aimed to help engineering teams to monitor API requests, monitor performance, and fix issues for any critical usage.

It gathers and analyses the APIs you use directly from your smartphone without redirecting or proxy your traffic. Bearer monitors the efficiency and health of each API based on your actual use. It keeps track of events and their status within the team over time.

Pros:

• Simple and easy to use
• No more shadow APIs! Get informed if a new API is used
• Monitor your API timeout easily, and adjust it per endpoint based on your business needs

Uptrends

Uptrends is a cloud-based remote monitoring solution for websites, mobile applications, APIs, and servers. It assists users in ensuring the smooth operation of critical multi-step transactions performed across their websites. Users may make several API calls or HTTP requests to test their API’s performance, uptime, and functionality. Uptrends can also be used to monitor the performance of web applications that are integrated, such as shopping carts, login pages, forms, payment screens, and more.

Pros:

• It is a user-friendly tool
• It’s simple to get started with a risk-free 30-day trial that requires no credit card details
• Monitoring from various locations around the world is possible
• At no extra charge, a pre-configured, publicly accessible status page is included

Cons:

• Not that great UI
• Lack of customer support
• A lot of features can be problematic
• Dashboard design could be improved

Site24x7 Website Monitoring

ZOHO provides Site24x7, a monitoring suite of tools and solutions. It is, more specifically, an integrated cloud management system that can be used to track user experience when users and visitors access servers, websites, and applications from mobile or desktop devices.

Site24x7 provides centralized cloud monitoring for DevOps and IT activities and real-time tracking of real users accessing websites and apps from desktop and mobile devices. End-user experience testing is carried out from more than 100 places around the world and from a variety of cellular carriers.

Pros:

• As the name suggests, you can monitor your sites 24×7
• It provides an excellent user experience by allowing you to track websites and servers in real-time
• A server is very simple to set up, maintain, and control
• Keep track of your estate with detailed alerts and notifications delivered through a variety of channels

Cons:

• It’s not as easy to set up a network feature as it is to create a website or a server
• The user interface is a bit confusing for some
• Configuring the transactions recorder to your taste will take a long time

Checkly

Checkly is another API monitoring tool that uses a single, quick dashboard to track the status and output of your API endpoints and critical site transactions. It’s a modern, cross-functional DevOps platform that combines end-to-end testing and active monitoring.

Checkly is simple to use and fits into software workflows, emphasizing JavaScript-based open-source tech stacks. It can track API performance from 16 various locations and verify important site transactions such as logins, shopping carts, and onboarding flows.

Pros:

• Great user interface.
• Runs in actual Chrome browsers in the cloud.
• Notifications via email, Slack, Webhooks, Pagerduty, OpsGenie, Discord, and SMS

Cons:

• It does not offer a free plan.

Rigor

Rigor is a full-featured Website Monitoring Software for Companies, Small and Medium Businesses, and Startups. Rigor assists companies of all sizes in providing their end-users with quick and secure digital experiences.

This framework integrates synthetic monitoring with an intelligent optimization engine to help you identify, repair, and prevent website performance and user experience problems.

It is ideally designed for companies who appreciate a positive website user experience and are interested in tracking key performance metrics and learning how to improve them using 300+ best practices.

Pros:

• It can create scripted steps for checking your website’s functionality
• The content search ensures that our site map is up to date and navigable regularly
• Rigor helps to track the number of main performance metrics when monitoring websites over time
• Rigor has a great toolkit built on top of a well-understood framework

Cons:

• Missing ICMP Ping feature and mobile app
• Some may find it difficult to monitor internal sites

Honorable Mentions

Did we miss any API monitoring tool? Please do let us know in the comments.

• ITRS Group provides an API monitoring solution.

Final Words

In this article, we have covered some of the most popular API monitoring tools. The tools can help you in various ways; for example, you can use some tools to perform load tests or even debug an issue that needs to be resolved from the backend.