Digital transformation is at the center of modern enterprise. Yet, as cloud initiatives take shape and the complexity of connecting systems and applications multiplies, the need to tie everything together and automate processes grows. APIs, otherwise known as application programming interfaces, fuel this automation. These small pieces of code—which connect and interconnect clouds, containers, microservices and applications—help organizations compress what used to be years of project development into months or weeks.

As businesses connect functionality—often across companies and service providers—APIs lead to an enhanced user experience. Simply put, they make it possible for much of the magic of the internet to take place, including seamless authentication, data sharing, payments and collaboration.

Today, it’s next to impossible to find an enterprise application that doesn’t rely on APIs. Yet, despite all the gains, APIs can cause plenty of pain. The slow performance or complete failure of an API can lead to an array of problems. These include customers who can’t complete transactions, employees who can’t collaborate through critical apps, and incomplete or incorrect supply chain data.

Today, a typical organization relies on more than 1,200 cloud-based applications and hundreds or even thousands of APIs. For many businesses, 50% to 90% of revenues are linked to APIs. If a system underperforms or breaks, there’s often no way to identify the root cause and fix it promptly. Reputational damage and lost sales often ensue.

When Good APIs Go Bad

It’s important to recognize that the monolithic applications of the past are a vanishing breed. Today’s highly-distributed software and services environment taps a universe of more than 24,000 APIs. It isn’t unusual for a transaction to pass through several cloud containers and across numerous companies en route to the desired outcome. Along the way, these APIs encounter different hardware, code and conditions.

When APIs work well, a process or transaction typically finalizes within milliseconds—and the digital experience usually excels. However, if a page loads slowly, a promotional code doesn’t work or payment doesn’t go through, the odds are high that somewhere along the line something went astray with an API.

For many organizations, there’s no simple and fast way to identify the source of the problem, understand the current impact, and take steps to fix the failure post haste. In fact, it isn’t unusual for several thousand or more failed transactions to pile up before the issue hits IT’s radar and anyone begins to notice a problem. By then, shoppers have likely abandoned shopping carts and sales have evaporated.

Adding to the challenge is the fact that APIs can fail in several ways. Not surprisingly, the number one problem is availability. If the API doesn’t function, the interaction or transaction cannot take place. In addition, an API might perform slowly or erratically, thus delivering highly inconsistent and frustrating experiences for users along with a problem that is difficult to diagnose and fix. Yet another problem is misconfigured or poorly functioning APIs that return incomplete data or the wrong data.

The real-world fallout can be significant. In practical terms, a customer shopping at a clothing retailer’s website may find it impossible to add socks to a shoe order or use one or more payment services. It may be impossible to cash in points from a loyalty program or view delivery information. Broken APIs can disrupt or break shopping carts, customer accounts, supply chain data, collaboration links, security tools, and much more.

Of course, when things go haywire, finger-pointing and conflicts with vendors, business partners and customers often ensue.

Deep Visibility

In today’s API-centric world, detecting problems early and often is critical. What makes the task so difficult is that API transactions do not unfold in a linear way. They bounce across servers and companies—often a couple dozen of them—scattered all over the world. Further complicating things: This routing can change at any given instant.

Identifying specific issues that trigger a problem—traffic bottlenecks, bandwidth issues, code problems and more—requires the right tools. It’s vital to understand how an API-based transaction behaves across a dozen or even two dozen hops and touchpoints that extend through clouds, containers and microservices.

Passive visibility tools, while useful for getting closer to the end-user, do not offer a comprehensive and granular view of events and processes. Today, businesses require broader and deeper observability capabilities that extend across an ecosystem of APIs and into the entire IT landscape—from network to device. It’s vital to understand how customers use websites, apps and other services.

Making Integrations Matter

As organizations delve deeper into clouds and digital interconnectivity, a more nuanced approach that incorporates both passive and active observability is in order. This approach makes it possible to emulate a user journey and quickly identify problem points. A business can detect problems as they pop up—after only a handful of failed transactions—rather than thousands or even tens of thousands of transactions later.

With a best-practice observability and remediation framework in place, an enterprise can establish baselines and triggers for alerts and notifications. It can assemble a complete picture within a single pane of glass and troubleshoot across the delivery chain. Whether the API involves a collaborative task within the organization or a financial transaction that stretches across several companies, it’s possible to view the entire transaction—and experience.

With both passive and active monitoring in place, a business can evolve beyond constant fire-fighting mode. Armed with the information and insight required to make vendors more accountable, businesses ensure they are getting the level of service (SLA) they are paying for. Make no mistake, as digital transformation initiatives accelerate and cloud complexity grows, it’s critical to ensure that APIs, microservices and other digital components are up to speed.