Maintaining a list of API endpoints becomes difficult as services change. API Radar, part of Service Monitoring, automatically discovers HTTP endpoints from traffic observed by Sematext Agent. This gives you zero-instrumentation monitoring without adding libraries or configuring each endpoint separately.

A critical API needs regular checks even during quiet periods. Synthetics sends requests on a schedule from your selected monitoring locations, helping you detect availability and response-time problems without waiting for user traffic.

An API can return a successful status code and still return incorrect data. Synthetic checks validate responses against your expectations, helping you catch failures that an availability check alone could miss.

Different API problems need different signals. Synthetic alerts tell you when a scheduled check fails, responds slowly, or returns an unexpected response. API Radar alerts identify elevated error rates, high latency, and missing Authorization headers in observed traffic. Both provide certificate-expiry alerts to help you renew certificates before they interrupt API access.

When checkout slows down, the affected endpoint is the starting point for investigation. API Radar shows how its traffic, errors, and latency have changed. Open Network Map to identify services that depend on the affected service and assess the potential blast radius. For deeper analysis, add distributed tracing to investigate operations inside the application.