Synthetic Monitoring
API TESTING SERIES
This blog was written by Zishan Malik, Technical Project Manager
There are so many tools out there that can make your life easier, hence for the longest time I struggled with getting organized. What gives me comfort is that I am not the only one out there with that issue. Towards the end of last year, I spent a significant amount of time trying to find a way to get organized with everything from my tasks to outlook. And as a good engineer, I didn’t want to manually do the work, I wanted to automate it. So, how can I get my meetings, tasks, and to-do list in a centralized tool? Before I get into what I did to remedy my problem, let me provide a list of all the tools I was working with such as, JIRA, Trello, Outlook, Todoist, etc., to name a few.
So here is how I approached the issue. I wanted to get everything into one centralized tool. That means I had to choose which tool that is going to be. I chose that to be Trello, I wanted everything to go into Trello, the reason being they have some outstanding integrations. The second thing I did was to find a middle man to do the integration for me, here is where my research paid off. I started using a tool called IFTTT, which integrates with all the tools that I am working with. I can create an Applet which initiates a new Trello card everytime I get a meeting invite in Outlook. Furthermore, I can have IFTTT to do the same thing when I create a to-do task in Todoist. I did this types of integrations with all my other tools and WALLAH! I now have everything coming into Trello. So, all I have to do is go to Trello and sort through the task-list. That’s my own personal experience integration helping me achieve a resolution to a problem of being unorganized. I can only image how it can make other people’s life so much simpler.
API Integration
Hence, why businesses are putting in so much effort into open API’s and integrations. If a product can offer a customer an integration to a customer which consolidates their other tools or works hand-in-hand with the other tools, then the customer is more likely to purchase that product. This brings me to my recent endeavor, a client asked to take the data from Apica and import into Splunk. So, I said, as Barney Stinson would say, “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!” We developed a python script that pulls via API the last run results and aggregated data from Apica and sends it to Splunk. After that, we were able to take that data and write queries to sort through the data set. At which point, we were able to create a dashboard using the sorted data sets. The client was static of the progress we had made and happy with the integration. This allowed the customer use the data to create business analytics and a business case regarding their applications.