Your business relies on third-party APIs to operate. Sometimes they enhance your capabilities, and other times they bridge the gap between your business and where your customers are through integrations. Either way, the intermingling of data and services between your business and these third-party vendors can put your business at risk. When it comes to ensuring these providers are handling data securely, SOC 2 has become one of the most common security frameworks for tech companies.

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.

In our previous article we talked about Synthetic Monitoring—a technique used to automate the testing and monitoring of resources by performing simulated user interactions and API calls. Now we're going to look at a complimentary technique called real-user monitoring which takes a more passive hands-off approach.

Testing uptime, response time, and other performance metrics in applications can take a few different shapes. One common technique is an approach known as synthetic monitoring. This form of performance monitoring doesn't rely on real users interacting with a service, and instead uses automated tools to mimic interactions. Then, the results are recorded and parsed just like other solutions.

Some APIs provide data we benefit from. Others are hooks into an ecosystem that our users find valuable, and others provide features that are difficult to build. What happens when we need access to data that users expect, but an API doesn’t exist? Maybe you’re building an automotive application that would benefit from pulling driving statistics from the user’s car, but the manufacturer’s API is private.

FinTech isn't new, but the reach of its usefulness continues to spread into unexpected areas. One such area is card issuing. Card issuing is the ability of financial institutions to issue debit or credit cards—either physical or virtual. This might not seem like much, but when combined with new business needs and consumer trends we start to see interesting use cases crop up.

Measuring performance in Node.js applications can sometimes be a challenge. Do to the nature of the event loop and asynchronous code, determining the actual time a piece of code takes to execute requires tools built into the platform. First added in Node.js v8.5, as stableas of v12, the Performance Measurement APIs are stable and allow much more accurate monitoring than earlier implementations.