Imagine you’re curious about the number of Super Bowl wins by each NFL team from 1967 to 2024. Stay with me – stranger things are googled every day.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) have quietly evolved into the backbone of contemporary business operations, even though it's ironic that most people use APIs without even realizing it. For instance, you're ordering your favorite takeaway online; you tap the payment button, and voilà! Through APIs, your payment information swiftly traverses the digital landscape, promptly reflecting the adjustment in your credit card balance.

If you’re an SRE, then you already know your SLOs from your SLAs, not to mention your SLIs. But even if you’re not au fait with those acronyms, you’ll soon discover how widespread and applicable these concepts are in this installment of our IPM Best Practices Series. We’ll explore these concepts in detail and explore how external monitoring can enhance the tracking of Service Level Objectives (SLOs), leading to positive user experiences and informed decision-making.

In the previous installment of our Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) Best Practices Series, we explored the critical importance of monitoring what matters, from where it matters. Now, we pivot to a core aspect of Internet Resilience: Customer Experience (CX). This blog explores the critical role of IPM in achieving faster Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Recover (MTTR).

Today, any revenue-generating website is like a house of cards, poised to collapse with multiple points of failure. The modern service delivery chain relies on intricate multi-step transactions and third-party API integrations, making the system more complex and interconnected. A single point of failure in the architectural diagram above can lead to slowdowns and outages with tangible consequences on your bottom line.

In the first installment of our IPM Best Practices Series, we explored the vast expanse of the Internet Stack and how its complex layers work in unison to keep digital services running. We laid the groundwork for understanding why Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) is pivotal for the resilience of our interconnected world. This post zeroes in on the imperative of monitoring precisely what matters, and from the right vantage points.

The digital landscape has dramatically transformed since the world’s first website went live at CERN on August 6, 1991. What began as a single webpage has exploded into a sprawling, intricate web of interconnected services and systems. The modern web is mind-bogglingly vast, complex, and, when it works, beautiful in its precision and technological harmony.

When a user clicks a link or types in a URL, their browser sends a signal across the Internet to a server that’s sometimes continents away, asking for all the pieces of a puzzle that make up your website.