CloudGate: Monitor the Availability of Cloud APIs

Constantly changing cloud environments make end-to-end visibility and ongoing monitoring a must. You need to know who is accessing services and how often, if there are problems and how they can be fixed, and how services are performing.

CloudGate delivers complete visibility into all API activity and end user experiences, and enables you to diagnose the source of problems when they happen so you can:

• Discover and troubleshoot user problems
• Report on overall performance and availability
• Manage SLAs
• Monitor business activity of your specific API’s by monitoring the content of request/responses

It has always been important to ensure the availability of applications and infrastructure and Web services are no different.

• Are your APIs available?
• Are you alerted when problems happen?
• Can you track trends in availability?
• Are your APIs responding correctly?

CloudGate periodically sends requests to verify availability and function of API. This "heartbeat" monitoring verifies that everything is working and sends alerts when there are issues with performance or functionality.

Going Beyond Traditional Availability Monitoring

CloudGate delivers all the same benefits of traditional monitoring solutions - customizable alerts, dashboards, performance and availability reports, SLAs, baselining and more. In addition, CloudGate automates many monitoring tasks by leveraging service policies. Cloudgate will:

• Auto-discover and configure monitoring settings
• Automatically update monitoring profile when changes are made
• Monitor real-world activity, not just synthetic requests
• Automatically respond to issues and prevent many problems

CloudGate Features for Availability Monitoring

Service End Point Availability Monitoring

CloudGate helps you manage API availability through active testing of service end points with periodic "heartbeat" monitoring. This provides you important visibility and reporting of the service uptime essential for supporting service level agreements. CloudGate provides a centralized management portal for:

• Viewing which APIs are deployed
• Viewing API uptime and response performance
• Viewing API fault messages and error conditions

Multi-step Transaction Availability

CloudGate's availability monitoring can also actively test the availability and function of multi-step business processes and transactions. It supports troubleshooting for composite business transactions by correlating performance bottlenecks or faults to individual services used in multi-step transactions. CloudGate's active transaction availability (heartbeat) monitoring includes:

• Monitoring generic API transactions with support for WS-Transaction, WS-Coordination
• Stepwise monitoring of response times and errors to reveal performance bottlenecks within each instance of a transaction
• Visibility into individual step fault or error information
• Reporting on transaction commits or rollbacks

CloudGate availability monitoring can also be used by development and testing teams to verify positive and negative service functions for different sets of service request criteria, different metadata or different message schemas.

API Performance Baselines

CloudGate's monitoring baseline options can reduce event notification clutter by allowing event thresholds to be set relative to service utilization trends. Event thresholds can then be set relative to a standard deviation percentage from the baseline rather than an absolute value, resulting in fewer unintended event notifications. CloudGate Enterprise includes the following baselining options:

• Rolling Baseline - Compare current performance metrics with a statistical baseline calculated for a period of hours preceding the current period.
• Weekly, Daily Baseline - Compare current performance metrics with performance baselines calculated for the same period day-over-day or week-over-week.
• Specific Date Baseline - Compare current performance metrics with the metrics from a specific date.

Flexible Alerting Options

CloudGate Availability Monitoring facilitates API management by enabling event notification when API performance has degraded or a service end point is no longer responding. Event notification alerts are generated when a monitored event threshold has been matched or exceeded. Alerts can be sent using the following media and protocols:

• Email
• Script Execution
• SNMP
• JMS
• SOAP

Reporting Functions

CloudGate improves management efficiency and visibility with reporting on performance, availability, and policy compliance in your API environment. CloudGate has scheduled reports for preselected intervals and also supports on-demand reports that allow you to focus on custom time intervals. CloudGate reports can be used to display:

• Performance and availability data in tabular and line chart formats
• Individual error events and events as percentage of total requests
• Fault totals for SLA reports