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The concept of Business Intelligence is certainly one of the main concerns of companies that aim to continuously improve their processes. Improving customer experience, having an optimized sales cycle, or identifying problems are fundamental for a healthy business. However, we often think of business intelligence restricted to sales or customer relationship areas, and as a result, we don’t prioritize the operational areas.
Our idea here is to present how business intelligence is not restricted to routines or data surveys, but a mindset that can be applied to different areas, and especially for integration strategies. In this context, monitoring APIs, and extracting rich data for decision making is extremely important.
The dream of any director is that the business goes well 100% of the time, and that services are not unavailable to customers. However, reality is a little different. Today, several factors make services scale absurdly in a short period of time.
Usually, the teams focus on important dates, or periods of specific promotions that can generate high demand. In fact, it is not uncommon for several services to face a surprise. An example is what we have recently passed in this pandemic period in relation to wheat flour.
In those moments, the expectations were (and they were confirmed) a strong increase in the demand for hygiene or cleaning products, in addition to dry pasta and non-perishable foods. However, nobody imagined that wheat flour could be an item that everybody would be "desperate" to find.
What happened was that in the quarantine, the number of people who started making cakes and breads increased considerably, reaching the point of flour shortages in some markets.
Of course, this example is just to illustrate how events are out of our control, and many factors can increase demand and then make some services unavailable. Bringing this unavailability to the IT universe is even more critical.
Imagine that your delivery app doesn't support Friday dinner orders? Or your news portal does not support traffic for breaking news? Here we are dealing not only with “shortages”, but also with a negative experience for your customers.
Your service not working at a critical time will have a greater impact than all the stability you have been delivering, and it can ruin all the efforts made so far. In this context, being one step ahead of error is critical to the fluidity of services.
Shifting from the experience delivery scenario, unavailability also reflects poorly on companies' revenues.
Thinking about ecommerce, unavailability in processing orders generates a big impact in only few minutes offline.
As we mentioned at the beginning of the post, data and impact analysis are essential to generate more business intelligence. So, having API monitoring and failure prevention are important steps in your strategy, as they are a rich source of data that details the business operation.
Here at Sensedia we offer services to support operations on our platform. Thus, each customer can get the most from their strategy, using all the features, as well as saving time and resources. API Care is an active monitoring of APIs, with a dedicated team that can ensure operation consistency by mapping channels, partners and strategic APIs.
Regarding analysis, defining the KPIs for your APIs is essential to have the perfect vision. One of the first steps is to understand what is essential to your business, and what kind of approach you intend with an API strategy.
Here, there are several indicators that must be monitored constantly, for example: does your business need high availability and are the margin concerns high? Looking at Availability and ROI is particularly important.
Monitoring the behaviour of APIs with a multidisciplinary team is another feature of the service offered by Sensedia. Here we have different professionals, who can look at every detail of the environments and, through optimized tools, identify their needs, using processes with the user to support incidents.
At this point it is important to highlight what we said at the beginning of the post: data analysis. The team performs this monitoring; however, based on pre-identified scenarios that enable the mitigation of errors. It works as a large database on recurring problems and their solutions, which makes it possible to always be one step ahead of the most common failures.
Another service advantage that contributes to intelligence generation for decision making is the operational reports. They list the main operations performance, APIs and apps that presented some type of error during a period, allowing detailed mapping for quick correction action.
In the Sensedia platform, we provide add-ons to help with operations. One of them is Flexible Actions, which automates the operation of APIs by configuring alarms and automatic actions. This feature establishes a cycle of preventive actions, configured according to the API parameters variation, giving more time to teams and reducing risks of human error.The main capabilities of Flexible Actions are:
Here at Sensedia we are very concerned about our customers’ API strategy success. Therefore, we always seek to provide various inputs to streamline and scale operations and deliver increasingly robust results. The combination of these two fronts aims to ensure that your operation is highly available and that the most common errors do not affect your business.
Integrating a team of experts with action automation can greatly enhance your journey and make you prepared for the unexpected.Another important point is the information that our specialists can deliver for your business. Having a careful look from API experts can generate rich insights that could be overlooked by others. This generates strong inputs for decision making and ensures a reliable database for business intelligence, especially in critical matters for API operation.
