Monitor API’s Using API Analytics

Hello Readers! In this blog we’ll see How to Monitor API’s Using API Analytics. Firstly we’ll see apigee analytics and after that we’ll see that how to Monitor API’s Using API Analytics. So stick to the end with me and see how we can do that.

Let’s get started !!!

Introduction

Apigee Analytics collects and calculates a wealth of information that flows through API Proxies , You can visualize its data in the apigee UI with predefined analytics dashboards as well as custom reports.

You can also generates secuirty reports to identify security threats to your APIs through apigee UI.

Apigee API Analytics collects and analyzes a broad spectrum of data that flows across API proxies such as Response time,Request latency,Request size,Target errors,API product name,Developer email address,App name,Transaction revenue.

For a complete listing of data collected by API Analytics, see Analytics metrics, dimensions, and filters reference.

Now let’s Monitor API’s Using API Analytics.

Analytics and API Monitoring tabs in the Apigee UI.

As you can see in the above image API Analytics covers :

API Metrics
Developers
End Users
Custom Reports
API Security : It will be seen on your apigee UI when you have a Advanced API Security enabled.

Apigee Anaytics includes :

predefined analytics dashboards
custom reports

Analytics Predefined Dashboards:

Apigee Analytics Dashboards helps us to see and detect changes in the API ecosystem and also helps us to visualize analytics data. Various predefined analytics dashboards Apigee UI contains are as follows :

API proxy Performance
Cache Performance
Error Code Analysis
Target Performance
Latency Analysis
Geomap
Devices
Traffic Composition

Now let’s see these dashboards one by one.

1.API proxy Performance:

This dashboard helps us to see API proxy traffic patterns and processing times.It also helps us in visualizing how much traffic APIs generate how long it takes for API calls to be processed.

To access the API Proxy Performance Dashboard:

Sign in to the Apigee UI
Select Analyze > API Metrics > API Proxy Performance.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

The above image shows the last 7 days of Proxy Performance of all the Proxies .This dashboard includes these charts:

Traffic
Average Response Time
Traffic By Proxy
Average Response time by proxy

This dashboard provides several types of interactivity as the list area to the right of each chart is interactive. Select a line in the list to toggle its view in the chart

NOTE: To know more about this CLICK

2. Cache Performance:

It helps us to see a glance the value of your Apigee cache. It also helps us to visualize the benefit of the cache in terms of lower latency and reduced load backend servers.

To access the API Proxy Performance Dashboard:

Sign in to the Apigee UI
Select Analyze > API Metrics > Cache Performance.

This dashboard measure metrics as follows:

Average cache hit rate

All cache hits

Cache hits by app

Average time with cache

Average time without cache

Cache improvement

NOTE: to know more about cache performance CLick

3. Error Code Analysis

Error code analysis tells you about the amount of error rates for API proxies and targets. The Error Code Analysis dashboard uses:

The response code to calculate proxy errors
The target response code to calculate target errors

NOTE: Errors reported on the Error Code Analysis dashboard might be different from errors reported on the API Proxy Performance dashboard because that dashboard calculates error rates based on the is_error flow variable.

To access the API Proxy Performance Dashboard:

Sign in to the Apigee UI
Select Analyze > API Metrics > Error Code Analysis.

The dashboard for Error Code Analysis looks like :

This dashboard measures :

Error Composition
Proxy Errors
Target Errors
Error by Proxy
Error by Target
Proxy Error by Response Code
Target errors by response code

As in the above image you see the Error Code Analysis Dashboard helps you see the error composition , proxy errors and proxy error by response code for all the proxies you have in your apigee.

NOTE: to know more about error code analysis as its various metrics follow Link

4. Target Performance

The Target Performance dashboard helps you visualise traffic patterns and performance metrics for API proxy backend targets.

To access the Target Performance dashboard:

Sign in to the Apigee UI.
Select Analyze > API Metrics > Target Performance.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

It measures the fields as :

Traffic by Target
Traffic
Response Time
Target Error
Payload Size

NOTE: to know more about this dashboard Click

5. Latency Analysis

The Latency Analysis dashboard can alert you to any latency issues your API proxies may be experiencing. It displays latency measurements down to the window of a minute, highlighting the median, 95th percentile, and 99th percentile values.

To access the Latency Analysis dashboard:

Sign in to Apigee UI.
Select Analyze > API Metrics > Latency Analysis.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

This dashboard measures metrics as Response time, Target response time, Response processing latency and Request processing latency .

NOTE: to know more Click

6. Geomap

The Geo Map dashboard tracks traffic patterns, error patterns, and quality of service across geographical locations.

To access the GeoMap dashboard:

Sign in to Apigee UI.
Select Analyze > End Users > Geomap.

This dashboard helps you assess:

API growth trends – Use the Traffic metric to see where your traffic is coming from.
Error trends – Use the Error Count metric to see where API errors are coming from.
Quality of service – Use the Average Response Time and Average Target Response Time metrics to see how the backend services are performing by country.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

This dashboard measure traffic , error count , Average response tine and Average target response time .

NOTE: Click here to know more about geomapping.

7. Devices Dashboard

The Devices dashboard tells you about the devices and servers that are being used to access your APIs.

To access the Devices dashboard:

Sign in to Apigee UI.
Select Analyze > End Users > Devices.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

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This dashboard measures the metrics as:

Traffic by OS Family
Traffic by agent
Traffic by agent type
Traffic by Device Category

NOTE: To know more CLICK

8. Traffic Composition

The Traffic Composition dashboard measures the relative contribution of the top APIs, apps, developers, and products to your overall API program.

To access the Traffic Composition dashboard:

Sign in to Apigee UI.
Select Analyze > Developers > Traffic Composition.

The dashboard opens as shown below:

This dashboard measures metrics as:

Overview
By dimensions

NOTE: Click here to know more about Traffic Composition.

Custom Reports:

Custom Reports are a way to specify precisely what you want to measure across your API Program and comes under API Analaytics.
They allow you to specify dimensions that you would like to watch out in your API Traffic .
It is also helpful in listing all client IP addresses that are hitting your apis.

To access the custom reports page using the Apigee UI:

Sign in to Apigee UI.
Select Analyze > Custom Reports > Reports

The custom reports page displays all custom reports that have been created for your organisation, as shown in the following figure:

the custom reports page enables you to:

View a list of all custom reports.
Add a custom report.
Run a custom report by clicking its name in the list. The report is run using the data collected over the last hour by default.
Search the list of custom reports by entering all or part of a relevant string in the search box.
Delete a custom report.

NOTE: One can generate custom reports for these metrics :

Follow Link : https://cloud.google.com/apigee/docs/api-platform/analytics/analytics-reference

Some examples to create custom reports for above metrics are as :

Average Transactions per second
Cache Hit
Traffic by Proxy
API Error Report
API Latency Report
Policy Error

Average Transaction Per Second

It means API proxy requests , per second .Custom report for average transaction per second looks like :

Cache Hit

It means the Number of successful API requests that use the ResponseCache instead of the response from the target service.Custom Report for cache hit look likes:

Traffic by Proxy

It means that the Total number of API calls processed by Apigee in the specified time period. THe traffic by proxy custom reports generates data as :

API Error Report

API Error Report means the Total number of times API proxies failed over the specified time period . THe reports shows data as :

API Latency Report

It means the Amount of time in milliseconds, that it takes Apigee to process API responses. It’s report look like:

Policy Errors

It means that the Total number of policy errors over the specified time period.Custom Reports to check the occurrence of policy errors in the API call displays as:

NOTE : We can create Custom Reports for other metrics to see the exact data we want to see for our proxies monitoring .

Conclusion

So, In this blog we have seen that how we can monitor api’s using API analytics. Hope this blog is helpful and you have learned a new thing to achieve and to monitor api’s performance.

Thank You !!!

Happy Learning !!!

Original article source at: https://blog.knoldus.com/

#api #analytics #devops

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Chloe Butler

1667425440

Pdf2gerb: Perl Script Converts PDF Files to Gerber format

pdf2gerb

Perl script converts PDF files to Gerber format

Pdf2Gerb generates Gerber 274X photoplotting and Excellon drill files from PDFs of a PCB. Up to three PDFs are used: the top copper layer, the bottom copper layer (for 2-sided PCBs), and an optional silk screen layer. The PDFs can be created directly from any PDF drawing software, or a PDF print driver can be used to capture the Print output if the drawing software does not directly support output to PDF.

The general workflow is as follows:

Design the PCB using your favorite CAD or drawing software.
Print the top and bottom copper and top silk screen layers to a PDF file.
Run Pdf2Gerb on the PDFs to create Gerber and Excellon files.
Use a Gerber viewer to double-check the output against the original PCB design.
Make adjustments as needed.
Submit the files to a PCB manufacturer.

Please note that Pdf2Gerb does NOT perform DRC (Design Rule Checks), as these will vary according to individual PCB manufacturer conventions and capabilities. Also note that Pdf2Gerb is not perfect, so the output files must always be checked before submitting them. As of version 1.6, Pdf2Gerb supports most PCB elements, such as round and square pads, round holes, traces, SMD pads, ground planes, no-fill areas, and panelization. However, because it interprets the graphical output of a Print function, there are limitations in what it can recognize (or there may be bugs).

See docs/Pdf2Gerb.pdf for install/setup, config, usage, and other info.

pdf2gerb_cfg.pm

#Pdf2Gerb config settings:
#Put this file in same folder/directory as pdf2gerb.pl itself (global settings),
#or copy to another folder/directory with PDFs if you want PCB-specific settings.
#There is only one user of this file, so we don't need a custom package or namespace.
#NOTE: all constants defined in here will be added to main namespace.
#package pdf2gerb_cfg;

use strict; #trap undef vars (easier debug)
use warnings; #other useful info (easier debug)


##############################################################################################
#configurable settings:
#change values here instead of in main pfg2gerb.pl file

use constant WANT_COLORS => ($^O !~ m/Win/); #ANSI colors no worky on Windows? this must be set < first DebugPrint() call

#just a little warning; set realistic expectations:
#DebugPrint("${\(CYAN)}Pdf2Gerb.pl ${\(VERSION)}, $^O O/S\n${\(YELLOW)}${\(BOLD)}${\(ITALIC)}This is EXPERIMENTAL software.  \nGerber files MAY CONTAIN ERRORS.  Please CHECK them before fabrication!${\(RESET)}", 0); #if WANT_DEBUG

use constant METRIC => FALSE; #set to TRUE for metric units (only affect final numbers in output files, not internal arithmetic)
use constant APERTURE_LIMIT => 0; #34; #max #apertures to use; generate warnings if too many apertures are used (0 to not check)
use constant DRILL_FMT => '2.4'; #'2.3'; #'2.4' is the default for PCB fab; change to '2.3' for CNC

use constant WANT_DEBUG => 0; #10; #level of debug wanted; higher == more, lower == less, 0 == none
use constant GERBER_DEBUG => 0; #level of debug to include in Gerber file; DON'T USE FOR FABRICATION
use constant WANT_STREAMS => FALSE; #TRUE; #save decompressed streams to files (for debug)
use constant WANT_ALLINPUT => FALSE; #TRUE; #save entire input stream (for debug ONLY)

#DebugPrint(sprintf("${\(CYAN)}DEBUG: stdout %d, gerber %d, want streams? %d, all input? %d, O/S: $^O, Perl: $]${\(RESET)}\n", WANT_DEBUG, GERBER_DEBUG, WANT_STREAMS, WANT_ALLINPUT), 1);
#DebugPrint(sprintf("max int = %d, min int = %d\n", MAXINT, MININT), 1); 

#define standard trace and pad sizes to reduce scaling or PDF rendering errors:
#This avoids weird aperture settings and replaces them with more standardized values.
#(I'm not sure how photoplotters handle strange sizes).
#Fewer choices here gives more accurate mapping in the final Gerber files.
#units are in inches
use constant TOOL_SIZES => #add more as desired
(
#round or square pads (> 0) and drills (< 0):
    .010, -.001,  #tiny pads for SMD; dummy drill size (too small for practical use, but needed so StandardTool will use this entry)
    .031, -.014,  #used for vias
    .041, -.020,  #smallest non-filled plated hole
    .051, -.025,
    .056, -.029,  #useful for IC pins
    .070, -.033,
    .075, -.040,  #heavier leads
#    .090, -.043,  #NOTE: 600 dpi is not high enough resolution to reliably distinguish between .043" and .046", so choose 1 of the 2 here
    .100, -.046,
    .115, -.052,
    .130, -.061,
    .140, -.067,
    .150, -.079,
    .175, -.088,
    .190, -.093,
    .200, -.100,
    .220, -.110,
    .160, -.125,  #useful for mounting holes
#some additional pad sizes without holes (repeat a previous hole size if you just want the pad size):
    .090, -.040,  #want a .090 pad option, but use dummy hole size
    .065, -.040, #.065 x .065 rect pad
    .035, -.040, #.035 x .065 rect pad
#traces:
    .001,  #too thin for real traces; use only for board outlines
    .006,  #minimum real trace width; mainly used for text
    .008,  #mainly used for mid-sized text, not traces
    .010,  #minimum recommended trace width for low-current signals
    .012,
    .015,  #moderate low-voltage current
    .020,  #heavier trace for power, ground (even if a lighter one is adequate)
    .025,
    .030,  #heavy-current traces; be careful with these ones!
    .040,
    .050,
    .060,
    .080,
    .100,
    .120,
);
#Areas larger than the values below will be filled with parallel lines:
#This cuts down on the number of aperture sizes used.
#Set to 0 to always use an aperture or drill, regardless of size.
use constant { MAX_APERTURE => max((TOOL_SIZES)) + .004, MAX_DRILL => -min((TOOL_SIZES)) + .004 }; #max aperture and drill sizes (plus a little tolerance)
#DebugPrint(sprintf("using %d standard tool sizes: %s, max aper %.3f, max drill %.3f\n", scalar((TOOL_SIZES)), join(", ", (TOOL_SIZES)), MAX_APERTURE, MAX_DRILL), 1);

#NOTE: Compare the PDF to the original CAD file to check the accuracy of the PDF rendering and parsing!
#for example, the CAD software I used generated the following circles for holes:
#CAD hole size:   parsed PDF diameter:      error:
#  .014                .016                +.002
#  .020                .02267              +.00267
#  .025                .026                +.001
#  .029                .03167              +.00267
#  .033                .036                +.003
#  .040                .04267              +.00267
#This was usually ~ .002" - .003" too big compared to the hole as displayed in the CAD software.
#To compensate for PDF rendering errors (either during CAD Print function or PDF parsing logic), adjust the values below as needed.
#units are pixels; for example, a value of 2.4 at 600 dpi = .0004 inch, 2 at 600 dpi = .0033"
use constant
{
    HOLE_ADJUST => -0.004 * 600, #-2.6, #holes seemed to be slightly oversized (by .002" - .004"), so shrink them a little
    RNDPAD_ADJUST => -0.003 * 600, #-2, #-2.4, #round pads seemed to be slightly oversized, so shrink them a little
    SQRPAD_ADJUST => +0.001 * 600, #+.5, #square pads are sometimes too small by .00067, so bump them up a little
    RECTPAD_ADJUST => 0, #(pixels) rectangular pads seem to be okay? (not tested much)
    TRACE_ADJUST => 0, #(pixels) traces seemed to be okay?
    REDUCE_TOLERANCE => .001, #(inches) allow this much variation when reducing circles and rects
};

#Also, my CAD's Print function or the PDF print driver I used was a little off for circles, so define some additional adjustment values here:
#Values are added to X/Y coordinates; units are pixels; for example, a value of 1 at 600 dpi would be ~= .002 inch
use constant
{
    CIRCLE_ADJUST_MINX => 0,
    CIRCLE_ADJUST_MINY => -0.001 * 600, #-1, #circles were a little too high, so nudge them a little lower
    CIRCLE_ADJUST_MAXX => +0.001 * 600, #+1, #circles were a little too far to the left, so nudge them a little to the right
    CIRCLE_ADJUST_MAXY => 0,
    SUBST_CIRCLE_CLIPRECT => FALSE, #generate circle and substitute for clip rects (to compensate for the way some CAD software draws circles)
    WANT_CLIPRECT => TRUE, #FALSE, #AI doesn't need clip rect at all? should be on normally?
    RECT_COMPLETION => FALSE, #TRUE, #fill in 4th side of rect when 3 sides found
};

#allow .012 clearance around pads for solder mask:
#This value effectively adjusts pad sizes in the TOOL_SIZES list above (only for solder mask layers).
use constant SOLDER_MARGIN => +.012; #units are inches

#line join/cap styles:
use constant
{
    CAP_NONE => 0, #butt (none); line is exact length
    CAP_ROUND => 1, #round cap/join; line overhangs by a semi-circle at either end
    CAP_SQUARE => 2, #square cap/join; line overhangs by a half square on either end
    CAP_OVERRIDE => FALSE, #cap style overrides drawing logic
};
    
#number of elements in each shape type:
use constant
{
    RECT_SHAPELEN => 6, #x0, y0, x1, y1, count, "rect" (start, end corners)
    LINE_SHAPELEN => 6, #x0, y0, x1, y1, count, "line" (line seg)
    CURVE_SHAPELEN => 10, #xstart, ystart, x0, y0, x1, y1, xend, yend, count, "curve" (bezier 2 points)
    CIRCLE_SHAPELEN => 5, #x, y, 5, count, "circle" (center + radius)
};
#const my %SHAPELEN =
#Readonly my %SHAPELEN =>
our %SHAPELEN =
(
    rect => RECT_SHAPELEN,
    line => LINE_SHAPELEN,
    curve => CURVE_SHAPELEN,
    circle => CIRCLE_SHAPELEN,
);

#panelization:
#This will repeat the entire body the number of times indicated along the X or Y axes (files grow accordingly).
#Display elements that overhang PCB boundary can be squashed or left as-is (typically text or other silk screen markings).
#Set "overhangs" TRUE to allow overhangs, FALSE to truncate them.
#xpad and ypad allow margins to be added around outer edge of panelized PCB.
use constant PANELIZE => {'x' => 1, 'y' => 1, 'xpad' => 0, 'ypad' => 0, 'overhangs' => TRUE}; #number of times to repeat in X and Y directions

# Set this to 1 if you need TurboCAD support.
#$turboCAD = FALSE; #is this still needed as an option?

#CIRCAD pad generation uses an appropriate aperture, then moves it (stroke) "a little" - we use this to find pads and distinguish them from PCB holes. 
use constant PAD_STROKE => 0.3; #0.0005 * 600; #units are pixels
#convert very short traces to pads or holes:
use constant TRACE_MINLEN => .001; #units are inches
#use constant ALWAYS_XY => TRUE; #FALSE; #force XY even if X or Y doesn't change; NOTE: needs to be TRUE for all pads to show in FlatCAM and ViewPlot
use constant REMOVE_POLARITY => FALSE; #TRUE; #set to remove subtractive (negative) polarity; NOTE: must be FALSE for ground planes

#PDF uses "points", each point = 1/72 inch
#combined with a PDF scale factor of .12, this gives 600 dpi resolution (1/72 * .12 = 600 dpi)
use constant INCHES_PER_POINT => 1/72; #0.0138888889; #multiply point-size by this to get inches

# The precision used when computing a bezier curve. Higher numbers are more precise but slower (and generate larger files).
#$bezierPrecision = 100;
use constant BEZIER_PRECISION => 36; #100; #use const; reduced for faster rendering (mainly used for silk screen and thermal pads)

# Ground planes and silk screen or larger copper rectangles or circles are filled line-by-line using this resolution.
use constant FILL_WIDTH => .01; #fill at most 0.01 inch at a time

# The max number of characters to read into memory
use constant MAX_BYTES => 10 * M; #bumped up to 10 MB, use const

use constant DUP_DRILL1 => TRUE; #FALSE; #kludge: ViewPlot doesn't load drill files that are too small so duplicate first tool

my $runtime = time(); #Time::HiRes::gettimeofday(); #measure my execution time

print STDERR "Loaded config settings from '${\(__FILE__)}'.\n";
1; #last value must be truthful to indicate successful load


#############################################################################################
#junk/experiment:

#use Package::Constants;
#use Exporter qw(import); #https://perldoc.perl.org/Exporter.html

#my $caller = "pdf2gerb::";

#sub cfg
#{
#    my $proto = shift;
#    my $class = ref($proto) || $proto;
#    my $settings =
#    {
#        $WANT_DEBUG => 990, #10; #level of debug wanted; higher == more, lower == less, 0 == none
#    };
#    bless($settings, $class);
#    return $settings;
#}

#use constant HELLO => "hi there2"; #"main::HELLO" => "hi there";
#use constant GOODBYE => 14; #"main::GOODBYE" => 12;

#print STDERR "read cfg file\n";

#our @EXPORT_OK = Package::Constants->list(__PACKAGE__); #https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1072691; NOTE: "_OK" skips short/common names

#print STDERR scalar(@EXPORT_OK) . " consts exported:\n";
#foreach(@EXPORT_OK) { print STDERR "$_\n"; }
#my $val = main::thing("xyz");
#print STDERR "caller gave me $val\n";
#foreach my $arg (@ARGV) { print STDERR "arg $arg\n"; }

Download Details:

Author: swannman
Source Code: https://github.com/swannman/pdf2gerb

License: GPL-3.0 license

#perl

Carmen Grimes

1598959140

How to Monitor Third Party API Integrations

Many enterprises and SaaS companies depend on a variety of external API integrations in order to build an awesome customer experience. Some integrations may outsource certain business functionality such as handling payments or search to companies like Stripe and Algolia. You may have integrated other partners which expand the functionality of your product offering, For example, if you want to add real-time alerts to an analytics tool, you might want to integrate the PagerDuty and Slack APIs into your application.

If you’re like most companies though, you’ll soon realize you’re integrating hundreds of different vendors and partners into your app. Any one of them could have performance or functional issues impacting your customer experience. Worst yet, the reliability of an integration may be less visible than your own APIs and backend. If the login functionality is broken, you’ll have many customers complaining they cannot log into your website. However, if your Slack integration is broken, only the customers who added Slack to their account will be impacted. On top of that, since the integration is asynchronous, your customers may not realize the integration is broken until after a few days when they haven’t received any alerts for some time.

How do you ensure your API integrations are reliable and high performing? After all, if you’re selling a feature real-time alerting, you’re alerts better well be real-time and have at least once guaranteed delivery. Dropping alerts because your Slack or PagerDuty integration is unacceptable from a customer experience perspective.

What to monitor

Latency

Specific API integrations that have an exceedingly high latency could be a signal that your integration is about to fail. Maybe your pagination scheme is incorrect or the vendor has not indexed your data in the best way for you to efficiently query.

Latency best practices

Average latency only tells you half the story. An API that consistently takes one second to complete is usually better than an API with high variance. For example if an API only takes 30 milliseconds on average, but 1 out of 10 API calls take up to five seconds, then you have high variance in your customer experience. This is makes it much harder to track down bugs and harder to handle in your customer experience. This is why 90th percentile and 95th percentiles are important to look at.

Reliability

Reliability is a key metric to monitor especially since your integrating APIs that you don’t have control over. What percent of API calls are failing? In order to track reliability, you should have a rigid definition on what constitutes a failure.

Reliability best practices

While any API call that has a response status code in the 4xx or 5xx family may be considered an error, you might have specific business cases where the API appears to successfully complete yet the API call should still be considered a failure. For example, a data API integration that returns no matches or no content consistently could be considered failing even though the status code is always 200 OK. Another API could be returning bogus or incomplete data. Data validation is critical for measuring where the data returned is correct and up to date.

Not every API provider and integration partner follows suggested status code mapping

Availability

While reliability is specific to errors and functional correctness, availability and uptime is a pure infrastructure metric that measures how often a service has an outage, even if temporary. Availability is usually measured as a percentage of uptime per year or number of 9’s.

AVAILABILITY %DOWNTIME PER YEARDOWNTIME PER MONTHDOWNTIME PER WEEKDOWNTIME PER DAY90% (“one nine”)36.53 days73.05 hours16.80 hours2.40 hours99% (“two nines”)3.65 days7.31 hours1.68 hours14.40 minutes99.9% (“three nines”)8.77 hours43.83 minutes10.08 minutes1.44 minutes99.99% (“four nines”)52.60 minutes4.38 minutes1.01 minutes8.64 seconds99.999% (“five nines”)5.26 minutes26.30 seconds6.05 seconds864.00 milliseconds99.9999% (“six nines”)31.56 seconds2.63 seconds604.80 milliseconds86.40 milliseconds99.99999% (“seven nines”)3.16 seconds262.98 milliseconds60.48 milliseconds8.64 milliseconds99.999999% (“eight nines”)315.58 milliseconds26.30 milliseconds6.05 milliseconds864.00 microseconds99.9999999% (“nine nines”)31.56 milliseconds2.63 milliseconds604.80 microseconds86.40 microseconds

Usage

Many API providers are priced on API usage. Even if the API is free, they most likely have some sort of rate limiting implemented on the API to ensure bad actors are not starving out good clients. This means tracking your API usage with each integration partner is critical to understand when your current usage is close to the plan limits or their rate limits.

Usage best practices

It’s recommended to tie usage back to your end-users even if the API integration is quite downstream from your customer experience. This enables measuring the direct ROI of specific integrations and finding trends. For example, let’s say your product is a CRM, and you are paying Clearbit $199 dollars a month to enrich up to 2,500 companies. That is a direct cost you have and is tied to your customer’s usage. If you have a free tier and they are using the most of your Clearbit quota, you may want to reconsider your pricing strategy. Potentially, Clearbit enrichment should be on the paid tiers only to reduce your own cost.

How to monitor API integrations

Monitoring API integrations seems like the correct remedy to stay on top of these issues. However, traditional Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools like New Relic and AppDynamics focus more on monitoring the health of your own websites and infrastructure. This includes infrastructure metrics like memory usage and requests per minute along with application level health such as appdex scores and latency. Of course, if you’re consuming an API that’s running in someone else’s infrastructure, you can’t just ask your third-party providers to install an APM agent that you have access to. This means you need a way to monitor the third-party APIs indirectly or via some other instrumentation methodology.

#monitoring #api integration #api monitoring #monitoring and alerting #monitoring strategies #monitoring tools #api integrations #monitoring microservices

Domingo Jakubowski

1595396220

Top 10 API Security Threats Every API Team Should Know

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Typical prevention mechanisms like Captchas and browser fingerprinting won’t work since APIs by design need to handle a very large number of API accesses even by a single customer. So where do you start? The first thing is to put yourself in the shoes of a hacker and then instrument your APIs to detect and block common attacks along with unknown unknowns for zero-day exploits. Some of these are on the OWASP Security API list, but not all.

Insecure pagination and resource limits

Most APIs provide access to resources that are lists of entities such as /users or /widgets. A client such as a browser would typically filter and paginate through this list to limit the number items returned to a client like so:

First Call: GET /items?skip=0&take=10 
Second Call: GET /items?skip=10&take=10

However, if that entity has any PII or other information, then a hacker could scrape that endpoint to get a dump of all entities in your database. This could be most dangerous if those entities accidently exposed PII or other sensitive information, but could also be dangerous in providing competitors or others with adoption and usage stats for your business or provide scammers with a way to get large email lists. See how Venmo data was scraped

A naive protection mechanism would be to check the take count and throw an error if greater than 100 or 1000. The problem with this is two-fold:

For data APIs, legitimate customers may need to fetch and sync a large number of records such as via cron jobs. Artificially small pagination limits can force your API to be very chatty decreasing overall throughput. Max limits are to ensure memory and scalability requirements are met (and prevent certain DDoS attacks), not to guarantee security.
This offers zero protection to a hacker that writes a simple script that sleeps a random delay between repeated accesses.

skip = 0
while True:    response = requests.post('https://api.acmeinc.com/widgets?take=10&skip=' + skip),                      headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer' + ' ' + sys.argv[1]})    print("Fetched 10 items")    sleep(randint(100,1000))    skip += 10

How to secure against pagination attacks

To secure against pagination attacks, you should track how many items of a single resource are accessed within a certain time period for each user or API key rather than just at the request level. By tracking API resource access at the user level, you can block a user or API key once they hit a threshold such as “touched 1,000,000 items in a one hour period”. This is dependent on your API use case and can even be dependent on their subscription with you. Like a Captcha, this can slow down the speed that a hacker can exploit your API, like a Captcha if they have to create a new user account manually to create a new API key.

Insecure API key generation

Most APIs are protected by some sort of API key or JWT (JSON Web Token). This provides a natural way to track and protect your API as API security tools can detect abnormal API behavior and block access to an API key automatically. However, hackers will want to outsmart these mechanisms by generating and using a large pool of API keys from a large number of users just like a web hacker would use a large pool of IP addresses to circumvent DDoS protection.

How to secure against API key pools

The easiest way to secure against these types of attacks is by requiring a human to sign up for your service and generate API keys. Bot traffic can be prevented with things like Captcha and 2-Factor Authentication. Unless there is a legitimate business case, new users who sign up for your service should not have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Instead, only trusted customers should have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Go one step further and ensure any anomaly detection for abnormal behavior is done at the user and account level, not just for each API key.

Accidental key exposure

APIs are used in a way that increases the probability credentials are leaked:

APIs are expected to be accessed over indefinite time periods, which increases the probability that a hacker obtains a valid API key that’s not expired. You save that API key in a server environment variable and forget about it. This is a drastic contrast to a user logging into an interactive website where the session expires after a short duration.
The consumer of an API has direct access to the credentials such as when debugging via Postman or CURL. It only takes a single developer to accidently copy/pastes the CURL command containing the API key into a public forum like in GitHub Issues or Stack Overflow.
API keys are usually bearer tokens without requiring any other identifying information. APIs cannot leverage things like one-time use tokens or 2-factor authentication.

If a key is exposed due to user error, one may think you as the API provider has any blame. However, security is all about reducing surface area and risk. Treat your customer data as if it’s your own and help them by adding guards that prevent accidental key exposure.

How to prevent accidental key exposure

The easiest way to prevent key exposure is by leveraging two tokens rather than one. A refresh token is stored as an environment variable and can only be used to generate short lived access tokens. Unlike the refresh token, these short lived tokens can access the resources, but are time limited such as in hours or days.

The customer will store the refresh token with other API keys. Then your SDK will generate access tokens on SDK init or when the last access token expires. If a CURL command gets pasted into a GitHub issue, then a hacker would need to use it within hours reducing the attack vector (unless it was the actual refresh token which is low probability)

Exposure to DDoS attacks

APIs open up entirely new business models where customers can access your API platform programmatically. However, this can make DDoS protection tricky. Most DDoS protection is designed to absorb and reject a large number of requests from bad actors during DDoS attacks but still need to let the good ones through. This requires fingerprinting the HTTP requests to check against what looks like bot traffic. This is much harder for API products as all traffic looks like bot traffic and is not coming from a browser where things like cookies are present.

Stopping DDoS attacks

The magical part about APIs is almost every access requires an API Key. If a request doesn’t have an API key, you can automatically reject it which is lightweight on your servers (Ensure authentication is short circuited very early before later middleware like request JSON parsing). So then how do you handle authenticated requests? The easiest is to leverage rate limit counters for each API key such as to handle X requests per minute and reject those above the threshold with a 429 HTTP response. There are a variety of algorithms to do this such as leaky bucket and fixed window counters.

Incorrect server security

APIs are no different than web servers when it comes to good server hygiene. Data can be leaked due to misconfigured SSL certificate or allowing non-HTTPS traffic. For modern applications, there is very little reason to accept non-HTTPS requests, but a customer could mistakenly issue a non HTTP request from their application or CURL exposing the API key. APIs do not have the protection of a browser so things like HSTS or redirect to HTTPS offer no protection.

How to ensure proper SSL

Test your SSL implementation over at Qualys SSL Test or similar tool. You should also block all non-HTTP requests which can be done within your load balancer. You should also remove any HTTP headers scrub any error messages that leak implementation details. If your API is used only by your own apps or can only be accessed server-side, then review Authoritative guide to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for REST APIs

Incorrect caching headers

APIs provide access to dynamic data that’s scoped to each API key. Any caching implementation should have the ability to scope to an API key to prevent cross-pollution. Even if you don’t cache anything in your infrastructure, you could expose your customers to security holes. If a customer with a proxy server was using multiple API keys such as one for development and one for production, then they could see cross-pollinated data.

#api management #api security #api best practices #api providers #security analytics #api management policies #api access tokens #api access #api security risks #api access keys

Autumn Blick

1601381326

Public ASX100 APIs: The Essential List

We’ve conducted some initial research into the public APIs of the ASX100 because we regularly have conversations about what others are doing with their APIs and what best practices look like. Being able to point to good local examples and explain what is happening in Australia is a key part of this conversation.

Method

The method used for this initial research was to obtain a list of the ASX100 (as of 18 September 2020). Then work through each company looking at the following:

Whether the company had a public API: this was found by googling “[company name] API” and “[company name] API developer” and “[company name] developer portal”. Sometimes the company’s website was navigated or searched.
Some data points about the API were noted, such as the URL of the portal/documentation and the method they used to publish the API (portal, documentation, web page).
Observations were recorded that piqued the interest of the researchers (you will find these below).
Other notes were made to support future research.
You will find a summary of the data in the infographic below.

Data

With regards to how the APIs are shared:

Documentation is where just the Swagger/OpenAPI docs are hosted somewhere. e.g. https://api.linkgroup.com/member/docs/index
Portal is where an interactive portal has been developed. e.g. https://dev.telstra.com/
The web page is where the company has a single page that isn’t interactive explaining their Public APIs. e.g. https://www.bendigoadelaide.com.au/banking-products-api.asp

#api #api-development #api-analytics #apis #api-integration #api-testing #api-security #api-gateway

Flo D'Amore

1602682380

Build vs. Buy Behavioral Email Platform for API Product Companies

Behavioral email is automated and targeted messages sent to customers based on their actions or behavior. By triggering on how your customers interact with your website or product, you’re able to send email whose content is actually aligned with what they’re doing, and will therefore be far more likely to resonate.

API companies are uniquely positioned to take advantage of behavioral emails; If monitoring and analytics is done right, then insights into what’s going on deep within the platform can be surfaced; And insightful, or even prescient, communiqués can be made.

Common capabilities of behavioral email in API platform companies include helping developers speed API integration & try out new product features, and keeping customers informed on subscription & platform issues.

Off-the-shelf behavioral email solutions can provide all of the functionality as outlined in this article. But in this post we’re going to break down what it would take, technically, to build your own behavioral email solution.

What’s required to build your own behavioral email solution?

A behavioral email product consists of at least three parts:

1. A methodology to get monitoring data from an API

2. A way to define rules and validate the monitoring data

3. A process to send specific emails to users when a rule is met

Acquisition of monitoring data from an API

Depending on how confident you feel, you could build a whole monitoring solution from scratch, or you could employ an off-the-shelf open-source system such as Prometheus.

Prometheus is a monitoring solution for microservices. By including a Prometheus client in your application, it can be called when you want to record a metric. The Prometheus server will then poll the data source at regular intervals and persist the result. The Prometheus docs have a setup guide to help with installation.

Prometheus clients come with default metrics configured out-of-the-box, so you don’t have to manually set up basic stuff like CPU or memory monitoring.

For a Node.js/Express.js based API, you can install the Node.js client for Prometheus via NPM and configuration only takes a few lines of code:


const prometheus = require('prom-client');

const register = new prometheus.Registry();

prometheus.collectDefaultMetrics({ register });

The default metrics are fundamental and not API related, so you would have to set up more complex metrics yourself.

The code for a very simple API metric might look like:


const activeRequests = new client.Gauge({

 name: 'activeRequests'

});

registry.registerMetric(activeRequests);

api.use((req, res, next) => {

 activeRequests.inc();

 res.on('close', () => activeRequests.dec());

 next();

});

Prometheus only covers three out of the top 15 most important API metrics you should be tracking, the rest have to be defined with custom code.

#api #email marketing #api integration #analytics platforms #api monitoring #monitoring and alerting #api providers #email api #email solution #user behavior analytics