API monitoring guides
Answers to the questions teams ask about watching an API in production and finding why a request failed.
Monitoring basics
What API monitoring is, what to measure, and how it relates to observability.
What is API monitoring? What to measure and how to set it up
Explore API monitoring signals and blind spots through Cloudflare’s documented regional network incident.
Start here6 min readWhat is observability? Logs, metrics and traces, and the questions they answer
Understand observability, high-cardinality context, logs, metrics and traces through Intercom’s firsthand engineering experience.
6 min readAPI monitoring vs observability: what each one does in an incident
How monitoring detects API incidents and observability explains causes, with a documented GitHub investigation and practical diagnostic steps.
6 min readLogs vs metrics vs traces: what each records, costs and answers
Understand logs, metrics and traces through a local telemetry comparison, including storage tradeoffs and how to correlate signals.
6 min read
Measure an API
How fast your API is, what to track, and the targets to hold it to.
Which API metrics should you track? The four golden signals, per operation
Choose API traffic, error, latency and saturation metrics through GitHub’s documented database connection incident.
5 min readWhat is API latency? Phases, p95 and p99, and latency vs response time
Learn API latency phases, p50, p95, p99, tail risk and the difference between server time and the caller experience.
6 min readSLA vs SLO vs SLI: definitions, 99.9% uptime math and error budgets
Compare SLA, SLO and SLI, calculate error budgets, and see how a real Google SRE policy connects reliability targets to releases.
6 min read
Set up monitoring
Health checks, alerts and status pages, set up step by step.
How to set up an API health check: liveness, readiness and uptime checks
Set up API liveness, readiness, and external uptime checks, with a local test showing why a simple HTTP 200 can be misleading.
6 min readHow to set up API alerts: thresholds, windows and who gets paged
Design actionable API alerts with thresholds, windows, SLO burn rates, and a reproducible comparison of alert-rule noise.
6 min readWhat is an API status page? What it shows, and what its bars hide
Learn what API status pages should show, what daily uptime bars hide, and how Atlassian communicates incidents.
5 min read
Debug failures
Following one failed request to the cause, through logs, traces and errors.
Try it on your own spec
See what your API and the SDKs your users install do in production, from one stream you can query.