The perils of unknown API changes

Picture this. You are the Chief Marketing Officer for a major retailer that is in the process of becoming a data-driven enterprise.

You’ve figured out how to fully integrate all 85 of your data sources after countless hours of extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) your data into a warehouse or visualization tool.

The company hasn’t grasped the complete power of automation yet, so it was a long, tough, and expensive journey. But you got there.

One fine Monday morning, you wake up, confident that your data is reliable enough to guide your business decisions. You settle into your office, grab your coffee, take a sip, and look at your screen. You drop your coffee. The mug shatters, nearly ruining your new hardwood floor and it dawns on you: Facebook changed their API. Weeks ago.

Since the disruption, you realize you haven’t been receiving any data from them. You’ve been using incomplete data to make decisions that could impact your bottom line this whole time. Your team then scurries to reconnect the API and hopefully reconstruct what you lost.

Now what about the other 85 sources? Are those still working? How can we know?

The majority of the time, sites like Facebook and others don’t announce when they make changes to their platforms, which affect your API connections. Your team has to either be on their toes constantly monitoring your connections or risk things slipping through the cracks.

The solution: automatic alerts of any disruptions caused by API changes.

If you could get notified whenever an API gets disconnected, how much time, labor, and *coffee* would you save? Because, as we’ve mentioned in previous posts, bad data can lead to bad results.