Show HN: Monitor the Downtime of 170+ Popular Web APIs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Monitor the Downtime of 170+ Popular Web APIs

zapier.com

143 pointsbryanh33 comments

We've had a few requests on HN about releasing this info, so we did it. Some more information is available on the introduction blog post: https://zapier.com/blog/2013/05/06/introducing-api-status-bo... We also provide an RSS feed and JSON API to access this data.

I'll watch this thread all day and answer questions, as well as field requests. This is for you guys, so if we're missing something vital, let us know and we'll get on it.

Wow this is great! I was literally working on something just like this last week.

A couple of things I found to be of value in my project that you might find helpful:

1) Endpoint-level granularity

A lof of APIs are RESTful these days, and the trend is for more to be that way than not. It would be nice to see (optionally) the uptime broken out by resource for that API. APIs generally connect to a bunch of different backend services on the API provider's side (think the difference between SMS and Voice with Twilio), and there's a high likelihood that one part could be down while the other is not (e.g. SMS is down for Twilio, but Voice is not).

2) Response Times

This is tricky because response times can be fickle for any number of reasons like network issues, for example. However, I've found that there is value in monitoring response times and big jumps (e.g. anything 1-2 standard deviations off the norm warrants an alert). What would be really cool is if you can monitor response times across various AWS regions.

Great suggestions:

1) Some less popular endpoints have lower volume, so that would be a challenge to be sure of issues. However, we could probably aggregate the endpoints that are causing issues and attach them to the report. We'll look into that.

2) Response times are definitely of interest too, we don't track that now though. We'll think on that as well.

We're currently authoring an API and have a built an extremely crude reporting page showing endpoint response times by method.

https://sandbox.microco.sm/api/debug/slow?method=GET

The data on it isn't accurate at the moment as I keep runnning tests designed to flush caches and then re-request resources which skews the numbers.

I want this kind of data so that if I were a developer implementing against an API I would have real data to tell me what the expected response times for a HTTP method and endpoint.

When we get to producing an uptime page, I was thinking of treating uptime as a relative quality measure rather than a yes|no thing... if an endpoint responds in more than a couple of seconds then it's score might by 80%, and less than 50ms then it's 100%, and unresponsive or down would be 0%.

Question is: Is this kind of thing useful? Does anyone have a preferred format for this kind of data?

Minor suggestion is to have another table for services that have a current elevated status so it's easy to see at a glance.

Otherwise, looks good.

Not sure how well the site's font renders on other machines/browsers, but on Windows 7 Pro x64, Google Chrome 26.0.1410.64 m, your font renders with holes in it. Very odd.

Screenshot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49805/Status%20%C2%B7%20... (Scroll down to bottom area to see worst of it, like the title "How does this work?".)

We've noticed that, it is very odd indeed. We're going to get that fixed ASAP, thanks for the report + screenshot.

Chrome's web font rendering on Windows is terrible (as is its high-DPI support and text color accuracy). It does this to virtually every custom font without super thick weight. I've opened bug reports since early 2012 that keep getting pushed back to the next milestone indefinitely. There's not much that can be done about it except use default fonts or accept that things will look kinda crappy on the largest browser/OS combination.

Seeing that you guys can integrate the Eve Online API into everything makes me smile ear to ear. I've gotta find a way to use you guys for something, just for coming up with that idea.

That API was actually added by an awesome user (hi, Shalom!) via our developer platform. We're not shy about unconventional APIs.

Awesome site! It would be great if you added Amazon APIs on this as well.

Specifically: Amazon Product Advertising API https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/deta...

I bet this thought might be shared by others, with any number of APIs out there we don't yet support.

One cool tidbit about the status board is we automatically track global apps added via our developer platform! https://zapier.com/developer/

We've even had folks add APIs for products they don't own simply because they really wanted to use an certain service with Zapier.

I would like to give a shout-out to Zapier as a tool for building production level systems. One of our production app's module is built completely on Zapier and it has worked really well till now.

I love Zapier!! These guys have a great story, too - began out of Startup Weekend in Missouri..then to YC... then funding.

Keep up the good work!!

Great stuff!

When I showed this to a coworker, he pointed out http://api-status.com/

Which appears to be no longer maintained.

Yep, they almost achieve the same thing - unfortunately its terribly out of date and there is no real API for the page.

One addition I would add would be to actually link to the service or their status page. If you are going to call them out if their service is down, at least give them something in return, i.e. discovery.

Nicely made.

Only thing I could suggest would making the headers sticky/fixed since there are so many rows.

Great suggestion, we'll do that.

Edit: done, should be deployed later today.

Would like to see Scribd on there, I've had problems with them in the past. (That's what I get for hosting my resume there :P)

Just curious, why would you host resume on Scribd?

For embedding on my site. I'm a web developer, it just looks cool to have the document visible on the page.

There's plenty of limitations, I got rid of it eventually.

Add mtgox, btce-e, bitstamp.net, and bitinstant. Those are web apis that need some monitoring and could have a lot of value.

JSON Web of the same. API https://zapier.com/status/json/.

Are you going to link the logos to their respective sites?

Hmmm, I think we bubble that information up into that view. I'll look into it.

Who made that date order right to left? -.-

Very cool. My only suggestion would be to see the top bar no matter how far down I scroll.

Another comment suggested this and we've added it, should be pushed later today.

Cool. :) Great site.

And when this site is down... there's a joke in there somewhere.

how do i check zapier status?

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