Digital experiences depend on APIs. A single user action, such as checking out on an e-commerce site or interacting with a virtual assistant powered by a large language model (LLM), can trigger a chain of API calls across third-party platforms. Think analytics tools, geolocation services, payment gateways, and more.
And when third-party API performance degrades, it’s not always clear where the problem lies.
This can lead to you and your team spending valuable time debugging your own application. Half a day later, you discover the root cause is a problem with an external SaaS provider.
Ideally, third-party platforms respond instantly and end users never notice what’s happening behind the scenes. In reality, performance issues with third-party APIs are a common and frustrating cause of web application failures.
When Bing’s API went down last year, it caused more than five hours of disruption to services dependent on it. Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, and DuckDuckGo all experienced issues, highlighting how big a ripple effect third-party API failure can cause for end users.
While these APIs extend your application’s capabilities, they also expand your surface area for risk.
Here’s how synthetic monitoring solutions like Uptrends help you take control of third-party APIs and multi-vendor environments, alongside three key benefits it delivers.
1. Proactively Check APIs to Accelerate Issue Identification
Third-party APIs can fail silently. Unless you are proactively testing their performance, issues such as slow response times, unexpected errors, or regional outages can go unnoticed — until they impact users.
With synthetic monitoring via public and private checkpoints, you have 24×7 visibility of how API endpoints are behaving from different locations around the world. These synthetic checks simulate real-world traffic to:
- Track uptime and reachability.
- Measure response times.
- Detect error codes and verify API responses.
You can establish performance baselines for each third-party API and detect issues the moment they occur, instead of relying on user complaints to signal a problem.
This is especially important in global deployments. An API might perform well in North America but experience degraded service in EMEA or APAC due to regional infrastructure or CDN issues.
Say an online travel platform integrates with a third-party weather service API. It does this to show local conditions alongside hotel listings. When the API slows down due to a regional issue, hotel pages load partially or not at all. Consequently, the business loses revenue from frustrated users who look elsewhere to book.
Without API monitoring in place, you need to dig through logs and application performance monitoring (APM) data to find the cause. But since the problem sits with a third party and is outside your control, it’s a lot harder to uncover and resolve.
With API monitoring, you can spot the degradation in real time and mitigate the impact. For instance, you could opt to switch to a cached backup or suppress the weather module temporarily.
That insight can make the difference between a minor annoyance and a poor digital experience for your customers.
2. Inform Conversations With Vendors to Accelerate Resolution
Third-party dependencies can make troubleshooting difficult. You don’t control the infrastructure, the code, or the uptime — but you’re still accountable for the user experience.
Third-party API monitoring gives you the necessary data to:
- Raise actionable support tickets with vendors.
- Prove that performance issues are occurring on their end.
- Escalate faster without needing to reproduce issues manually.
Take an e-commerce platform as an example. It notices a spike in cart abandonment during peak sales season. API monitoring can reveal intermittent timeouts from the payment gateway API and prove it’s causing the checkout process to freeze.
Armed with timestamped logs and response code data, you can immediately escalate the issue to the vendor to restore functionality and protect revenue.
With insightful alerts, your team can triage issues in minutes rather than hours, dramatically improving mean time to resolution (MTTR) and minimizing customer impact.
What’s more, historical data enables you to not only react but build a case. When an issue is persistent or affects service-level agreements (SLAs), your team can demonstrate patterns over time, making it easier to hold SaaS providers accountable and secure long-term fixes.
3. Standardize API Monitoring to Support SLA Compliance
Many teams rely on third-party APIs meeting SLAs to deliver against their own SLA commitments. But without consistent, independent monitoring, it’s difficult to verify whether external vendors are making good on their performance guarantees.
By monitoring each vendor’s API using the same tool and methodology, you can:
- Hold providers accountable to their SLAs.
- Benchmark performance across vendors.
- Inform renewal decisions, escalations, or architectural changes.
This standardization creates a single source of truth. Instead of juggling different dashboards, service portals, or alerting systems, your team can analyze all third-party dependencies through one unified interface.
For instance, a logistics platform might rely on separate APIs for address validation, delivery tracking, and customer communication. Each service has different SLA terms, but failures in any one of them can delay shipments.
By monitoring all third-party APIs through a unified dashboard, you can identify underperforming vendors and clearly report on their reliability to your stakeholders. This enables more strategic decisions, such as whether to build a fallback system, renegotiate contracts, or diversify vendor reliance.
As a result, you maintain compliance, reduce risk, and protect business continuity.
Don’t Let APIs Be the Blind Spot in Your Monitoring
Being the backbone of your digital experience, third-party APIs are too important to monitor passively.
A delay or failure in just one third-party service can disrupt your entire application. The impact could include revenue loss, support issues, and customer churn.
As businesses adopt more external tools to expand application functionality, the number of third-party APIs your services rely on continues to grow. Add machine learning models, generative AI APIs, or language services such as OpenAI and Azure OpenAI into the equation and that reliance grows exponentially.
This means more dependencies, more complexity, and a higher chance that performance issues will originate from outside your own infrastructure.
API monitoring gives you a proactive means to protect API performance, reduce downtime, and meet SLAs. You’ll know exactly when and where an issue is occurring, plus whether the control sits with you or your vendors.
With Uptrends API monitoring, you can:
- Use a global network of 230+ public checkpoints to monitor the reliability of third-party APIs.
- Easily simulate real, multi-step API calls across multi-vendor environments.
- Receive actionable alerts when something goes wrong, before users feel the impact.
By adopting third-party API monitoring, you’re not only protecting application performance — you’re protecting customer trust, brand reputation, and the bottom line. Third-party APIs may be invisible to your customers, but with the right monitoring approach, they won’t be invisible to you.
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