People throw the terms “availability” and “uptime” around a lot, but depending on what you’re monitoring, the definition of these terms may change. In this article we use the narrow definition, accessible, to explore the various options Uptrends has for checking availability on websites, APIs, and servers.

APIs revolutionized the digital landscape by introducing a new level of programming flexibility and ease of integration. Organizations turned to APIs to push innovation and creating an API economy. It was a key driver in the eCommerce industry, businesses like eBay leveraged APIs to generate additional revenue. eBay introduced APIs twenty years ago providing developers a platform to build applications that improved businesses. Today, eBay’s APIs generate over a billion dollars in business.

If you follow our very own @HLENKE, you might have seen his recent tweet. Availability and responsiveness are key topics for every SaaS platform. They also happen to be multi-level, complex topics that often span different technology stacks and can be tackled with a variety of approaches. Hannes' tweet actually gives us the perfect segue into a blog post about how our engineering team currently monitors Checkly.

One of the benefits of Serverless architectures is the possibility of scaling applications without worrying about load balancers and clusters of servers. While services like AWS Lambda hold their promises on this area, there are usually misconceptions about how they work. It is common for developers to assume that Lambda functions can scale infinitely, at any speed, in any circumstances. Reality is quite different from that.

Marc Andreessen famously said, “Software is eating the world.” Dr. Steve Willmott subsequently retorted, “APIs are eating software.” This is because API based architectures are enabling companies to get away from monolithic architectures and move to microservices. Innovative, disruptive companies like Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, Square, and Slack all build their infrastructure and technology using APIs.

No matter which path of the stack you work on, it’s crucial you make sure your website or API is up and running. We wanted to create a tool that can give you superpowers. Enter, Sematext Synthetics! You can monitor the availability of APIs and websites as well as their performance, and user journeys. This means 24×7 monitoring from multiple locations around the globe with alerts when things go wrong!