Tech Talk: Prometheus

We have recently implemented a new monitoring and alerting toolkit called Prometheus to track and monitor API usage. Prometheus will help give us insight into how our API is being used by our clients. To tell you more, here is our API team lead Valters Skrupskis.

Since we launched the PayProp Agency API, my team has been working with clients large and small to help them integrate data from their PayProp accounts into their systems. Now, we are receiving thousands of daily requests for data via the API. While it’s great to see such active use, it’s important we put in place tools to monitor data requests so we can continue to improve the process – and that’s where Prometheus comes in.

Prometheus allows us to record requests made to our API in a real-time series data set. The data can be labelled, showing us who made the API request, what they needed and, of course, the time our API server received each request and performed an action. Thanks to this insight, we can see when the servers are busiest and – as our data set builds over the months and years – better plan for busy periods, such as month-end or onboarding of new API clients.

Prometheus enables us to store our data on our Amazon cloud servers, so we are the only ones with access to it, which helps keep our client data secure. In addition, Prometheus has one of the best query languages, which allows my team to select, aggregate and view time series data in real time. Finally, the technology is 100% open source, which gives our developers an opportunity to improve their toolkit as we explore its capabilities as part of our API analysis.