
Show HN: Monitor the Downtime of 170+ Popular Web APIs - bryanh
https://zapier.com/status/
======
bryanh
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...](https://zapier.com/blog/2013/05/06/introducing-api-status-board/) 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.

~~~
goronbjorn
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.

~~~
buro9
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?

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

~~~
dangrossman
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.

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quaunaut
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.

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

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fireworks10
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...](https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html)

~~~
mikeknoop
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.

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prayag
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.

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mkoble11
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!!

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sciurus
Great stuff!

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

~~~
johns
Which appears to be no longer maintained.

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screeley
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.

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TannerLD
Nicely made.

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

~~~
bryanh
Great suggestion, we'll do that.

Edit: done, should be deployed later today.

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r0s
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)

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justhw
Just curious, why would you host resume on Scribd?

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r0s
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
missing_cipher
Cool. :) Great site.

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

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abimaelmartell
how do i check zapier status?

