Nowadays, the application landscape of an organization increasingly consists of cloud solutions in combination with on-premise applications or applications in their own data centers.
An advantage of a cloud solution is that you save on management costs because the “cloud” ensures that the application is available 24/7. As soon as a Cloud application integrates with applications in your landscape, this will usually go via a standardized way: APIs.
Monitoring a cloud solution
But does this mean that you no longer need to monitor this Cloud solution? That is not the case. The supplier of the Cloud application will probably say that these APIs are always available. Applications in the cloud equals always being available as they say.
It is important for your process that the APIs are either available or that the certificates used (we do communicate securely with the APIs) are still valid. Imagine for a moment that those APIs are called via the company network of your organization (on Premise) and that a problem still occurs. You definitely don’t want that. It’s time for the next step.
Elastic Heartbeat: keep an eye on your APIs
You can configure checks that monitor the APIs via Elastic Heartbeat. These checks are then performed for example every 10 minutes. If there are problems with the availability of the APIs, and the supplier says that this cannot be the case, you can use Elastic Heartbeat to show that there was actually a network failure or that the APIs were really down.
An additional advantage of using Elastic heartbeat for monitoring (https) APIs is that you automatically receive information about the validity of the used certificates. How convenient is that? For example, you will receive information about if the certificates used are still valid. Ideal for managing your SSL Certificates in this way. You can also set an Alert for this: if a certificate is still valid for less than 30 days, you will receive an automatic alert.
Fun fact
Since version 7.11 release of Elastic, a completely new Alerting framework is available and taken out of the Beta phase to use. The link to Slack and Microsoft Teams are fairly easy to set up. By arranging the use of Elastic heartbeat, you as an organization get a grip on the availability of the APIs used within your organization. As a bonus, you can also set up complete certificate management with this beat. Get started quickly and monitor all your APIs.
If you need more information, please get in touch with us.