In today’s interconnected world, API monitoring is vital. Businesses rely on data in everyday operations, and often rely on Web APIs to send and access data. But if an API is down, slow or not behaving as expected, it can severely impact business operations. Whether you’re an API provider or rely on third-party APIs, continually monitoring your API environment lets you know when there’s a problem.
When I tell people that Sentry is open source, they nod, understanding that this is known to be a good, noble thing. Then, they have questions. Many questions. “You mean open core?” they ask. No. Open source. “So you sell professional services?” No. Head scratching, then a pause. “Then… how do you make money?”
Many of my fellow engineers ask me what it means to be an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer). When I tell them it’s a type of DevOps engineer, they get a glazed look in their eyes and then ask what a DevOps engineer is. I then find myself googling both job titles and reading twelve very different definitions until I reach the conclusion that these definitions vary wildly from company to company and from team to team.
The other day the HB team was chatting and Ben, our dev-ops master, mentioned that he wished he'd used ULIDs instead of UUIDs for a particular system. Like any seasoned engineer, my reaction was to mumble something non-committal then sneak over to Google to try to figure out what the hell a ULID is. Two hours later I emerged with a thousand-yard stare and the realization that the world of unique identifiers is larger and more wondrous than I ever could have imagined.
When creating EBS snapshots, it’s important that the snapshots be “consistent”. This means that the data on the snapshot is whole and complete. An EBS snapshot can be considered “inconsistent” if not all data was flushed to the filesystem, and/or if an application running on the EC2 instance was mid-write when the EBS snapshot was initiated.
So, when someone talks to you about APIs, do you still think it refers to Blas’ inseparable partner in Sesame Street? then you may have a little problem with technology. No one will ever mess with you again for this. But you must be careful. The explanation will be as educational and entertaining as those of the mythical Epi and Blas. Therefore, let’s answer this question: What is an api for?
I’ve never been on-call, but I’ve been on-call adjacent for a lot of my adult life—my partners, my housemates, my friends…they’ve largely been sysadmins, in Operations, or Dev/Ops, which means I’ve experienced a lot of the pain second-hand.
