Measure API reliability monitoring and check the results
To measure api reliability monitoring, choose one workflow and its owner. Define the events, test them with known inputs, and write a query that answers a specific question.
- 1
Choose when to log
Log completed and failed API requests from server handlers.
- 2
Capture the outcome
Begin with api_request_started, api_request_completed, api_request_failed and document the grain of each event.
- 3
Check the stored rows
Create dashboards and alerts for error rate, p95 latency, and top failing routes.
- 4
Make the decision
Which routes are slowest by p95 latency?
Use case versus template
Choose what to measure
Use this guide to choose what to measure and when to log it. For a shorter setup prompt, open the matching template.
Agent prompt
Paste this into your coding agent
Replace YOUR_API_KEY after signup, then ask the agent to run the product flow and verify the first events.
API reliability monitoring setup prompt
Add Telemetry instrumentation for API reliability.
Use /skill.md and this Telemetry API key: YOUR_API_KEY
Please log each important API endpoint with route_template, method, status_code, status, latency_ms, user_id or team_id when available, request_size_bytes, response_size_bytes, and error_type.
Create:
1. A table for API request events.
2. Charts for request volume, error rate, p50 and p95 latency, and top failing endpoints.
3. Alerts for elevated 5xx rate, slow p95 latency, and sudden traffic drops.
Do not log request bodies, auth headers, cookies, secrets, or raw user content.Setup steps
- 1Log completed and failed API requests from server handlers.
- 2Use route templates so different IDs and query strings don't split the same endpoint into separate groups.
- 3Capture status, latency, method, feature, team, and error type.
- 4Create dashboards and alerts for error rate, p95 latency, and top failing routes.
Events to capture
Questions you can answer
- Which routes are slowest by p95 latency?
- Which customer accounts are affected by errors?
- Where did traffic suddenly drop or spike?
Example event schemas
Event schemas for this workflow
Check what each event records, when to send it, and which field types it needs. Review the example payload and privacy checklist before using it in production.
Use these queries in Telemetry
Learn about Alerts
Add a threshold and recipients to your reliability query to get alerts.
Related SQL recipes
More SQL recipes
Run the query using this workflow's event fields and check the example result. Save the result to a dashboard or set up an alert.
Calculate API request throughput by route
Which API routes are processing the most requests per minute?
Open recipeMeasure API 429 rate-limit recovery
Do requests that receive HTTP 429 recover successfully after retrying?
Open recipeCalculate incident detection and recovery time
How long does each service take to detect and recover from incidents?
Open recipeCalculate API error rate by route
Which API routes have the highest 5xx error rate with at least 20 requests?
Open recipeCalculate p50, p95, and p99 API latency
Which endpoints have the worst tail latency?
Open recipeCalculate API timeout rate by route
Which API routes time out often enough to affect users?
Open recipeCompare dependency p95 latency
Which downstream dependencies have the worst tail latency and failure rate?
Open recipeMeasure API availability against an SLO
Did each service meet its daily availability objective?
Open recipeCalculate API error-budget burn rate
How quickly is the API consuming its 99.9% availability budget?
Open recipeCompare API reliability by release
Which releases coincide with worse API errors or tail latency?
Open recipeRank error fingerprints by customer impact
Which error groups affect the most customer accounts?
Open recipeCompare feature rollout error rate
Is the feature-flag rollout less reliable than its control cohort?
Open recipeMeasure incident customer impact by plan
How many accounts were affected by the incident in each plan?
Open recipeCustomer evidence
Related customer stories
Next step
Create the API key your agent will use
The free plan is enough to run the prompt, send test events, and review the first dashboard.
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