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What's the best way to monitor an API for breaking changes? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 21 hours ago by clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works to c/programming@programming.dev

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I have a vendor that sucks donkey balls. Their systems break often. An endpoint we rely on will start returning [] and take months to fix. They'll change a data label in their backend and not notice that it flows into all of their filters and stuff.

I have some alerts when my consumers break, but I think I'd like something more direct. What's the best way to monitor an external API?

I'm imagining some very basic ML that can pop up and tell me that something has changed, like there are more hosts or categories or whatever than usual, that a structure has gone blank or is missing, that some field has gone to 0 or null across the structure. Heck, that a field name has changed.

Is the best way to basically write tests for everything I can think of, and add more as things break, or is there a better tool? I see API monitoring tools but they are for calculating availability for your own APIs, not for enforcing someone else's!

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[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 3 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

They haven't so far broken the historical data, so I can't directly compare a response to a known good, sadly.

[–] cv_octavio@piefed.ca 9 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Don't these clowns version their API?

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 3 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Not that I've seen! No endpoint tells me anything about the API or endpoint. Would that be in the response headers, maybe? I'll check, but they're bad at change control anyway and they use slightly different versions of their systems for each customer, so there's not really a unified version number anyway.

edit: Nothing in the headers.

[–] cv_octavio@piefed.ca 5 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I mean.... We version ours in the url.

/api/v1/some_enpoint

That way if, for whatever reason, you need to roll a breaking change, you do it in a new version mapped to a new url.

I'm sorry for what you're going through, I've been there before.

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 6 points 14 hours ago

They've never rolled out a breaking change INTENTIONALLY, which is a fun distinction!

[–] calliope@retrolemmy.com 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

You can compare the status to a 500 or a 404 though, to see if it’s running?

When it breaks, you’ll know.

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I do that, at least. Most recent problem was one endpoint returning [] instead of a bunch of JSON, still with a 200.

[–] calliope@retrolemmy.com 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Oh duh, I should have known someone would return an empty object/collection or a string or something (“Error”) and 200!

I feel like sometimes monitoring is a bit like whack-a-mole.

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 3 points 19 hours ago

That's my feeling, too.