Bearer is shedding its winter coat. As we stayed safe at home during the COVID-19 crisis, it gave us the opportunity to think about our vision for the API Monitoring industry. Today, we are releasing a brand-new dashboard, a rebuilt navigation, and improvements to many of our existing features. But one change is quite big, as it is changing one of the core features of our product. We have completely rebuilt the way API call logs are managed in Bearer.

At Bearer, we are a polyglot engineering team. Both in spoken languages and programming languages. Our stack is made up of services written in Node.js, Ruby, Elixir, and a handful of others in addition to all the languages our agent library supports. Like most teams, we balance using the right tool for the job with using the right tool for the time. Recently, we reached a limitation in one of our services that led us to transition that service from Node.js to Rust.

APIs are everywhere within your organization. Many may be internal, but we’re willing to bet there are many third-party web services and APIs that your business depends on too. Keeping track of them all, and ensuring that your team chooses the best APIs for their needs can be a challenge. In some cases, your organization may be using an API they don’t even know about. The solution to this “web of APIs” is to apply the concept of API governance to your API dependencies.

Webhooks run a large portion of the "magic" that happens between applications. They are sometimes called reverse APIs, callbacks, and even notifications. Many services, such as SendGrid, Stripe, Slack, and GitHub use events to send webhooks as part of their API. This allows your application to listen for events and perform actions when they happen. In a previous article, we looked at how to consume webhooks with Node.js and Express.