CA Technologies Acquires Runscope for API Monitoring

There’s a pressing need for a variety of monitoring tools more than ever. But given the proliferation of application programming interfaces (APIs) inside the enterprise, demand for API monitoring tools in particular is rapidly expanding. To address that requirement, CA Technologies has acquired Runscope, a provider of an API monitoring service delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.

Ali Siddiqui, general manager for agile operations at CA Technologies, says Runscope will complement CA Blazemeter continuous testing tools the company acquired last year and the CA API Management platform based on the technology CA Technologies gained when it acquired Layer 7 Technologies in 2013.

While the API Economy has been a phenomenon for external-facing web and mobile applications for years now, Siddiqui notes that IT organizations have only begun to rely on APIs to ingrate internal applications in recent years. The number of private internal APIs that have been published already dwarf the number of external public APIs. Because those internal APIs have now reached a critical mass, Siddiqui says the time is now right for CA Technologies to add an API monitoring service to portfolio of DevOps tools.

He notes that the rise of microservices inside enterprise IT organizations also will exacerbate existing API monitoring and management challenges. Each microservice generates its own API, which needs to be maintained and monitored. Before too long IT organizations will find themselves trying to unravel the interdependencies of thousands of microservices that all expose an API that can be developed in any number of programming languages.

These days it’s not uncommon to see dedicated management teams focusing on specific APIs. Rather than treating the API as an afterthought, many IT organizations have come to realize it’s the quality and robustness of the API that ultimately determines the quality of the application experience. In fact, most service level agreements (SLAs) going forward will require access to data being generated by APIs to make sure the terms of any agreement are being met. As such, it’s starting to make sense in some organizations to organize DevOps teams around critical APIs, rather than specific elements of application logic that, in the age of the containers, will soon be more frequently updated.

There’s no shortage of API monitoring tools these days, and Siggiqui says CA Technologies is committed to making sure the Runscope service remains open in terms of integration with other API management and testing tools. However, eventually there will be incentives provided to organizations that choose to standardize on multiple DevOps tools from CA Technologies.

Despite the proliferation of monitoring tools, the percentage of application workloads that are instrumented remains relatively small. The reason for this is that the cost of monitoring every enterprise application has often proven prohibitive. The issue that enterprise IT organizations will have to confront as dependencies between microservices increase will be figuring out how to implement instrumentation across all those services in a way that doesn’t wind up breaking the budget.

— Mike Vizard