If you have joined the thousands of IBM i users who are starting to realize the huge benefits of API enabling their IBM i applications, then you know that it is critical to keep those APIs up and running. Electronic processing via APIs can dramatically increase revenue and reduce costs but if the APIs are unavailable, all that value disappears. Once your users, customers and partners have gotten hooked on the value APIs provide, they won’t want to be without it. So, how do you ensure that you uncover any API problems before they impact your users? That’s where API health check monitors can be the solution.
API health check monitors are designed to automatically check the status of your APIs continuously. Unlike passive API monitors that don’t know an API is having a problem until production API calls start to fail, these tools proactively ping your APIs to see how they are doing. They can discover problems before your users, customers and business partners do. Health check systems can also provide you with detailed information on your API operations.
A quick warning – there are a lot of API health check tools out there that charge by the “ping”. Every time the system calls one of your APIs, you rack up a fee. If you are only calling a few APIs, this will not amount to much. However, if you are like one of the IBM i users we spoke with, those calls can result in thousands of dollars of charges every month. That customer had scores of API servers on each of their LPARs. Each server was being pinged every fifteen minutes. That led to close to 250,000 API calls every day just to check API health.
You can reduce those costs by using an API health check tool that does not charge by the volume of pings. But if that is not a possibility, you can reduce the number of pings by implementing a central API server that performs its own health checking. The health check tool pings the main server and in turn the main server connects directly to all of the API endpoints on all of your platforms. The central server then returns detailed health check information to the health check tool. With just a single ping, the health check tool gets information on a wide variety of APIs.
At Eradani, we have implemented health check functions that do not incur any volume based cost. And, if your company is using a tool that does charge by the ping, you can set up Eradani Connect to check on all of your IBM i APIs and return that information to your enterprise tool with a single ping. Eradani Connect is optimized for top performance so it can handle a very high volume of calls while routing those calls to many API endpoints. The health check functions work in conjunction with Eradani’s monitoring dashboard to ensure you always have the latest information on your API performance. If you’d like to learn more about health checks for IBM i APIs, contact us at info@eradani.com or through our website at www.eradani.com.
