Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

APIs power modern applications. Every login request, product search, payment authorization, and mobile app refresh depends on an API responding quickly and reliably. When latency increases, users feel it immediately. Pages stall. Transactions hang. Confidence drops. Most engineering teams measure API latency. Fewer truly monitor it. There is a difference. Many teams track average latency in dashboards and assume performance is healthy.

APIs sit at the core of modern digital infrastructure. From e-commerce checkouts and payment processing to SaaS platforms and mobile applications, APIs move the data that keeps systems running. But APIs do not operate as a single unit. They are made up of individual endpoints, and each endpoint represents a specific function or resource that users depend on. As organizations shift toward microservices, cloud native applications, and third party integrations, the number of endpoints increases rapidly.

Your AI coding agent just made every test pass. Ship it, right? Not so fast. A growing class of AI-generated bugs doesn’t come from writing bad code. It comes from the AI changing working code to accommodate its own mistakes. This isn’t a theoretical risk. It’s happening now, in production codebases, and it’s harder to catch than any bug the AI might introduce from scratch.

As a team, we have spent many years troubleshooting performance problems in production systems. Applications have become so complex that you need a standard methodology to understand performance. Our approach to this problem is called the Golden Signals. By measuring these signals and paying very close attention to these four key metrics, providers can simplify even the most complex systems into an understandable corpus of services and systems.

AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex are becoming a real part of developer workflows. They don't just write code, they call APIs, interpret responses, and take action based on what they find. That means the quality of your API responses directly affects how useful an agent can be. We've shipped a series of improvements to the Oh Dear API with this in mind. Every change helps humans too, but we specifically optimized for how agents consume and reason about data.

Most teams already know a lot about production. They have dashboards. They have traces. They have alerts. They have enough telemetry to explain what happened after an incident and enough graphs to argue about it for the rest of the week. Then they go to test a change and start from scratch. The integration tests hit a hand-written mock that returns {"status": "ok"}. The load tests replay a CSV somebody exported months ago. Staging is close enough to production right up until it matters.

November 24th, the Opus 4.5 release turned around the entire tech industry. This was the moment when agents became capable. Capable enough to write solid staff-level code. Capable enough to reason about alerts, investigate root causes much faster than most engineers, and set up the reliability layer faster. For me, this feels like an iPhone moment on steroids; the adoption of AI is accelerating much faster than any adoption curve I’ve seen over the past few decades.