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How to control external web services?

We are developing a web application that uses external web services as the main data source. Web services have been created and are maintained by one of our close partners. Despite the fact that they should work all the time, they are not 100% reliable. From time to time they cease to be accessible or start throwing exceptions.

What would be a good way to monitor external web services and get information when something happened?

Limitation:

  • Web Services is a host externally on our partner servers.
  • We do not have the source code for these web services.
  • We have no control over the common infrastructure

I was thinking of creating a simple .NET application that regularly calls web services and reports a problem (via email, in a log file or in db). But maybe you have better ideas?

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I was thinking of creating a simple .NET application that calls Internet services regularly and report when there is a problem (via email, in a log file or in db). But maybe you have better ideas?

In addition, as your company is informed that the services are not working, you can also inform the supplier, for example, by sending your technical support by e-mail or by placing an automatic call on your hotline or something like that.

If these services are critical to your business, you may agree to an SLA with a provider as part of your contract.

I don't know anything else that you can do, except perhaps to implement local data caching, if that makes sense in your scenario. This will isolate you, at least from temporary disruptions in web services.

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G'day

Here are a few aspects you should consider here.

Are external web services living behind a load balancing layer? In this case, you are pretty much limited in terms of the usefulness of what you can tell another company.

Do you have an SLA with a company to help ensure the provision of your web services? If you do this, you will need to support any claims with recorded data that change the degree of monitoring required.

How about having external companies like Gomez track the company’s web service application for you? They have great service. BTW I do not work for Gomez, I just use their services.

Does your company have service level agreements with any customers to submit your application? Once again, if you do, you will need to reduce the cost of any such fines, definitely having an SLA with another company.

Edit: I forgot to say that any of your probes should have at least two types.

  • the presence of an external platform and
  • availability of your specific service

NTN

'Avahappy

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