Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Want to use production traffic with k6? In this k6 tutorial, learn how Speedscale can capture, sanitize, and export production traffic into k6 load tests.

As APIs play a crucial role in connecting modern cloud applications, monitoring their availability and performance is a must if you want to provide a top-notch experience. A good API monitoring tool will help you build reliable APIs by identifying and resolving the issues before they reach your users. If you’re interested in such a solution, look no further. In this article, we reviewed some of the best API monitoring tools and services available today, both open source and commercial.

At the most basic level, application programming interface (API) monitoring checks to see if API-connected resources are available, working properly and responding to calls. API monitoring has become even more important (and complicated) as more elements are added to the network and the environment evolves, including multiple types of devices, microservices as a key part of application delivery, and, of course, the widespread move to the cloud.

Cribl’s interface is Super Neato: Reactive, beautiful, and easy to use. But sometimes you need to access settings and configurations programmatically. The good news is that interactive API docs are baked into your Cribl instance. The better news is that everything that happens in the GUI is making API calls. With your browser’s developer mode, you can easily take a peak behind the curtain to see exactly how the API was called and what the payload looked like.

A spicy article hit my inbox the other day. It came with a bold claim — “API testing is better than UI testing”. Absolutes like “A is better than B” rarely hold in the software world. “It depends” is the answer to most tech questions for a reason. Let’s compare API and UI testing and discuss why one isn’t better than the other. The frenemies are “just different”, and always will be. And that’s a good thing.

Skaffold is a command line tool that streamlines the workflow for building,pushing and deploying Kubernetes applications. Get started with our tutorial.