Get me API Shark observability… and make it snappy
We’re moving on from monitoring and management in some spheres of information technology.
Where we once had monitoring, alerting, abstraction and system visualisation alongside log analytics and tracing… we now move to a ‘superset’ of all those factors.
We call that superset observability.
Applications need observability, servers and networks need observability, cloud services need observability, granular aspects of data and information flow need observability and every aspect of interconnecting technology that exists in between also needs observability.
Logically then, we can say that APIs need observability.
Looking to provide observability for Application Programming Interface (API) technologies is Los Altos based CloudVector with its snappily named API Shark.
This is a free API discovery and observability tool that claims to automatically discovers and monitor API catalogues with high fidelity.
“Part of the reason that APIs are a huge risk is because developers are under pressure to deliver, but they don’t have time to register and maintain an API catalogue,” said Ravi Bulapari, founder and vice president, CloudVector.
API Shark is available for Kubernetes environments and incorporates cataloguing to automate API discovery and build a complete inventory of enterprise API assets using OpenAPI/Swagger.
It offers proactive risk assessment to atomatically generate API blueprints to identify common API risks, such as improper authentication or token re-use.
“No need to upload your API specification, let API Shark discover it for you,” claims the company.
Deep API inspection delivers visibility into real-time API calls and API payload metrics, such as response time latency, geographic origin of calls and access to critical enterprise assets.
Finally, CloudVector says that it’s easy to delpoy with no change to code, no need to use shims (a shim is a library that transparently intercepts API calls and changes the arguements passed, handles the operation itself or redirects the operation elsewhere) all with no change to network settings.