Regardless of what industry your company belongs to, you are obligated to think about the privacy of your customers. Not only is it good business, but privacy expectations have been set through regulations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and many others across the world.

One way that we monitor API calls from within our customer’s applications is through our agent. The Bearer Agent hooks into every API call in order to read the request, read the response, and in some scenarios act upon that information. The agent replaces methods in the HTTP clients with instrumented versions that call the original methods.

How many APIs does your organization rely on? A 2020 study by Slashdata found that 89% of developers use APIs, and the vast majority are using third-party APIs. These numbers aren’t unique to specific markets either. Regardless whether you are a software-first company, or offering a more tangible service, APIs are a vital part of modern infrastructures. Relying on APIs saves time, resources, and allows businesses to experiment in ways that otherwise would be hard to justify.

Async hooks are one of those Node.js features that seem interesting when you first see them, but in practice they end up failing to provide overtly obvious use cases. At their core, async hooks are a way to step into the lifecycle of any asynchronous resource. This may be a promise, a timeout, streams, DNS lookups, and even HTTP requests—like API calls. Most examples are focused on tracking the execution context or enhancing asynchronous stack traces.