Explore Your API’s Production Behavior Across Time
In this blog post, we introduce our newest feature: a custom time picker for the Metrics & Errors page.
Instant API monitoring with Akita
At Akita, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for developers to understand their own app’s production behavior. We do this through API monitoring, because the rise of SaaS means that most web apps do their heavy lifting via APIs.
Akita tells you what your application is doing in production by showing you all your in-use endpoints and letting you know their latency, as well as any errors. It’s great for finding problems you didn’t even know existed and pinpointing issues you know about but haven’t been able to root-cause. And Akita does all of this without any special configuration, just drop Akita into your application’s tech stack and get all of the information you need.
Or most of the information, that is.
Life before custom time
Up to now it’s been a challenge to answer questions like: “What’s happened since our last deploy,” or “Did our app’s performance get better or worse?” Even harder: “Did the deployment that happened yesterday address the errors it was supposed to?” While this information was there previously, it required a bit of work to find, since the Akita console always showed the last seven days of production data no matter what.
Part of our mission at Akita is to never require you to do more work than necessary to, well, do your work. We believe that every developer, regardless of experience with the codebase, state of the codebase, or DevOps expertise, should be able to get the information they need about the apps they build and maintain.
And so we’re extremely excited to announce a small but powerful change in Akita: a custom time picker for Metrics & Errors.
Life with custom time
With the ability to select custom times, you can:
- View your app’s behavior before and after a known change to see if latency or errors improved.
- See if your app’s performance got worse after a change, and know exactly where it slowed down or had errors so you can address it.
- Pinpoint the behavior of intermittent alerts and see what was going on just before the alert happened.
There are lots of ways to use custom time to help make your app better and your users happier. Let us know how you’re going to use custom time on Twitter or LinkedIn!
Know your app better
We hope this makes your app’s behavior even more accessible and your work a little easier! The Akita beta currently works for REST APIs running on Docker, container platforms, and Kubernetes. Sign up to try us out.
Photo by alexandru vicol on Unsplash.
