So, when someone talks to you about APIs, do you still think it refers to Blas’ inseparable partner in Sesame Street? then you may have a little problem with technology. No one will ever mess with you again for this. But you must be careful. The explanation will be as educational and entertaining as those of the mythical Epi and Blas. Therefore, let’s answer this question: What is an api for?

In a separate article, we introduced the concept of performing synthetic transactions with LogicMonitor to ensure website services are up and running correctly. It may be necessary to authenticate with a website before you can fully monitor it, and authentication may require presenting an MFA code that has been delivered via email. Let’s take this a step further and incorporate an MFA (Multifactor Authentication) Challenge.

API access is available at the Enterprise tier of our product. With it, you can create a whole range of heavily customized use cases to further expand our suite of offerings. For example, you can hit our API to send customized query results to a third party service like Nagios, or you can automate the creation and deletion of sub-accounts.

2018 was an interesting year for Node.js frameworks and open source software in general. Developer communities discussed the role of corporate sponsorship and how to maintain a project used by millions but not supported financially.

Rollbar introduced Versions a few months ago, providing developers a way to easily see whether their most recently deployed code changes are introducing new or reactivated errors. As a follow-on improvement, we've updated our Deploys API so you can notify Rollbar immediately when starting a deploy as well as when it completes.

We’ve today introduced a fully functional API for use with our Public Reporting tool. This allows you to carry out all of the functions that you would in app, but now you can automate and schedule these tasks instead of needing to complete them manually.

API checks are as simple or complex as you need them to be, offering a great deal of functionality in checking the uptime of your own tools. Combined with a powerful programming interface like REST API, your checks can prove quite useful. These checks are multi-step, meaning you can ask it to do almost anything so long as you present those requests in a syntax your server understands. The key to an API check is formatting your requests properly.

Since launch, we didn’t pay too much attention to the front end performance of the main Checkly web app. Shame on us. What better reason to dive into this than the publishing of the excellent The Cost of Javascript in 2018 by Google’s Addy Osmani? TL;DR: it took about half a day to go from an abysmal 34 to a 100 Lighthouse score on our Vue.js app.

Last week, we shipped an initial version of Puppeteer Recorder, a Google Chrome extension that records your browser interactions and generates a Puppeteer script. It turns out Chrome extension development is almost like real web development, but with a weird dash of quasi embedded development mixed in. This post talks you through the development lifecycle when creating an extension and lists some of the architectural gotcha’s. Source code for the extension in question is on github.

Last week the “beta” tag officially came off of Checkly ! I bumped into many things in the period between launching a private beta and hammering down on all features and ripping the beta notice of the nav.navbar. In this post, I tried to funnel a bunch of these learnings into a somewhat logical order, as they felled like hoops I had to jump through to get to the next hoop.