12 Resources for Perfecting Your API Performance Strategy

How do you measure the success of your APIs?

That’s the question we asked the 1,300+ API providers that participated in our State of API 2016Report.

API providers across all industries agreed — performance is the primary way to measure the success of an API.

Less than one third of API providers look at number of subscribers, monetization, or retention as the primary method for measuring the success of API. While these metrics are critically important, providers agree that the success of an API will be dependent on its ability to perform and meet user expectations.

But It’s Not Just Api Providers That Should Be Concerned About Api Performance.

Do your applications run on APIs? When an API breaks or malfunctions, your application feels the effects and so do your users. Even a minor delay is likely to lead users to abandon your application in favor of something else, and word of problems, failures, or availability issues can spread quickly across social media.

Do you rely on APIs to power internal systems? An issue with an internal API can bring your team’s productivity to a screeching halt, resulting in wasted time and resources for your organization.

The bottom line is this: APIs are the backbone of the service(s) your company delivers. They need to perform well in order for your applications to work as desired.

On Tuesday, April 26^th we’ll be kicking off a three-day webinar series focused on exploring high-performance API delivery strategies in 2016.

The first event, Why API Success is All About Performance and Readiness will be held on April 26^th at 9 AM & 2 PM ET.

The webinar will cover:

• What’s at risk when APIs are too slow for consumers
• Why does it take so long to determine the root cause
• How to avoid API performance issues before and after deployment

Reserve your spot for that session and the rest of the API Masterclass events today.

In preparation for the event, we wanted to share 12 additional resources for perfecting your API performance strategy. Learn how to test and monitor for API performance and safeguard your applications from API performance issues.

A Closer Look at API Performance

In addition to surveyed 1,300+ API providers as part of the State of API 2016 Report, we also collected responses from more than 1,000 API consumers. Find out what they both had to say about the importance of API performance. Also, find out how to create an API performance strategy that meets the demands of our connected world.

1. How APIs Make or Break Success in the Digital World [Infographic]
2. Insights into the State of API Performance in 2016
3. Why API Performance Matters (And What to Do About It)

Resources for API Performance Testing

Whether you’re developing an API to power other applications or building an API within your own corporate infrastructure, you need to establish a reliable testing process to prevent performance problems and understand any vulnerabilities or weaknesses in your API so you can prepare for failure scenarios.

Performance testing allows testers to answer questions like “Is my system doing what I expect under these conditions?”, “How will my application respond when a failure occurs?”, and “Is my application’s performance good enough?”

Use these three resources to get started with API performance testing:

1. eBook: Ensuring API Speed & Performance
2. The Role of Testing in API Performance
3. Don’t Fool Yourself: Load Testing APIs and Scale

Resources for API Performance Monitoring

Monitoring your APIs allows you to catch performance problems before they impact your end users. API monitoring also makes it easier to identify that your API is the source of a performance problem for your application. The following resources will help you get started with monitoring your APIs.

1. What is API Monitoring?
2. Why You Should Be Monitoring Your APIs
3. eBook: A Complete Guide to API Monitoring

Resources for Working With Third-Party APIs

While it may not be possible to completely prevent an API outage from taking down your website, web or mobile application, it is possible to take steps to reduce the impact of a third-party API outage. Learn more about working with third-party APIs.

1. APIs: A Costly Blind Spot for Your Application
2. 5 Ways to Safeguard Your Application from Third-Party API Outages
3. When Twitter Falls Down, Do You Stay Up? What Developers Can Learn from Twitter’s Latest Outage

Join Us for The API Masterclass April 26-28^th

The webinar series kicks off on Tuesday, April 26. We’ll be holding multiple sessions of each of the events on April 26 – April 28.

The events will be hosted by Priyanka Tiwari and Paul Bruce, product marketing managers from SmartBear Software, along with Andrew Fullen, API Implementation Strategist, Sogeti and Lou Powell, Information Architect & API Evangelist, Vanick Digitial.