Welcome to Part Two of our two-part series on REST APIs. Now that you’ve learnt all about what REST APIs are and how they work, let’s have a look at how you can get the most out of your REST APIs. We will illustrate this through the example of integrating Squared Up with the ServiceNow REST API.

A question we often get asked is: What exactly is a REST API, and how does it work? While APIs have long had their place in basic developer lexicon, their growing importance to all IT professionals is becoming hard to ignore. The growth in the number of APIs increased by its fastest ever rate in 2019 and, as a consequence of this API explosion, there are now over 22,000 publicly available APIs (according to leading online journal ProgrammableWeb).

The Summer 2019 release introduced: OpsQ Observed Mode, Learning-Based Auto-Alert Suppression and many more updates to the OpsRamp Platform. This week all OpsRamp customers are being updated to our August 2019 release. Customers and partners should review all the details in our release notes. Here’s a high-level summary of what’s new this month: Observed Mode is now available for Alert Escalation and First Response policies.

Managing the infrastructure monitoring system in a large-scale IT environment can be incredibly tedious. I’d be willing to bet that you’ve run into at least one of these issues or something similar. APIs exist because user interfaces can’t do everything, and we’re all very happy that they do! Zenoss Cloud supports two APIs: a JSON API for bulk administration and a streaming data ingest API to allow a wide variety of devices to publish data directly.

Cortex, the open source, horizontally-scalable, highly-available, clustered Prometheus implementation that powers Grafana Cloud’s Hosted Prometheus cut its first release yesterday! This release was led by Chris Marchbanks from Splunk, who put together the whole release process and shepherded this first release.

We’ve changed Transaction steps and Multi-step API Monitoring steps to Transaction credits and Multi-step API Monitoring credits. In short: Steps are used to group your actions in your monitor definitions, and credits are used to buy Transaction or Multi-Step API monitors. Let’s explain that in more detail.

If you’re not familiar with APIs, let’s run through a quick primer. API stands for application programming interface and refers to a set of tools and protocols that makes it possible to easily and efficiently access a software or hardware system from the outside.

In a recent post on customer feedback I mentioned being a recent convert to chat widget-driven tools. I thought they sucked, but I was wrong. Since then, I actually switched from Drift to Intercom because Intercom's focus — support & communication — matched my business better than Drift's heavy sales focus. To get the most out of Intercom, you need to integrate it with your app. This means instrumenting some code and tweaking some bits of your app's navigation.