If you provide a web service or benefit from a provided service, there’s typically an agreement between the provider and customers to contractually bind the provider to meet a certain level of service, otherwise known as a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The provider needs to be sure they deliver quality site performance and they’re extremely reliable, at the risk of hurting their brand reputation and losing customers.
If you’re on the receiving end of the service and an outage occurs, you won’t know until they notify you or your end users start calling. Not only are you at the mercy of their notice speed, but also their MTTR. Additionally, what people don’t know is most outages aren’t covered by a typical web-hosting SLA. “When it comes to hosting, an SLA will typically cover connectivity and not your specific site/application performance… If your website’s performance should drop and/or the site goes offline, unless it is a DIRECT result of the host’s network connectivity (not your code, not the server or any other reason), then it probably is not covered by the SLA.”[1]
Let’s look closer at use cases and why you should monitor third-party web applications and APIs.
Verify SLA for Clients
If you’re responsible for providing an API or SaaS application to various customers, you likely have an SLA of 99.95% (or higher) uptime. By monitoring your app or API’s uptime, you can ensure you keep your commitments to your customers. A web application monitoring tool can alert you immediately when downtime occurs, so you can find the issue and fix it fast. It also provides unbiased proof the agreed-upon SLAs are met.
Be the First to Know
Which situation would you prefer? That you know about a third party’s outage within minutes, or wait for them to figure out they have an outage, discover the cause, get communications written, and eventually notify you—if at all. SolarWinds® Pingdom® customers monitor the status page of their critical third-party services to learn about outages faster. In addition to the status page, if your app relies on the API of a third-party service, you can also monitor the API, so you’ll know why your application is having issues even before the third party sends out an update or updates their status page.
Site Availability Isn’t Enough
If you run an ecommerce business, you probably rely on an ecommerce platform. Since an ecommerce platform like Shopify might be doing the web hosting, you trust it’s great at keeping your online store up and always available. But is the #1 part of your site functioning? How would you know if a step in your checkout flow was broken? More importantly, when would you know? Without a monitoring tool, you might have to wait for a customer to let you know of a performance issue. Monitoring key transactions is extremely important to a business relying on its site to attract and convert new and returning business. Especially today, when the digital world has replaced the physical.
How to Monitor Third-Party Web Apps and APIs
With a web application monitoring tool like Pingdom, you can monitor uptime and response time of specific endpoints and critical flows to help ensure site availability and optimal performance. Whether you’re an application developer or a digital marketer, it’s important you know of a site issue as soon as possible, so you can direct it to those who can fix the site, especially if this person isn’t you. This visibility helps prevent downtime, frustrated customers, damage to your brand, and lost sales. Your team can be notified of an outage immediately via your preferred alert channel: email, text, Slack, PagerDuty, and more. Pingdom is easy to set up, easy-to-use, reliable, and affordable. Start monitoring in minutes. Download a 14-day free trial today.
[1] https://fatlabwebsupport.com/blog/service-level-agreements-web-hosting/
