Guilty as charged, but I typically don’t monitor how many API calls my customers are using. Till the moment we hit the limit – which is actually soft limit as I’ve been told by Salesforce Support and you can overrun by roughly 50 %.
But how to monitor when you need, because sometimes it is handy? For example when you are loading data into Salesforce and the API calls are running way quicker than you estimated?
In Salesforce Classic you can run the report showing usage over last 7 days, it doesn’t exist in Lightning. But for me it still doesn’t show enough details.
Then sAPIm came to my rescue and I learnt additional great things from it. The best part about the app – it doesn’t need Salesforce Shield/Event Monitoring.
It consist of three major blocks
API Usage
The basic overview where you can see day by day comparison including the baseline. Great for the overall monitoring, even better when you click on the specific day and you see all the details grouped by connected app or/and user.
Thanks to this report we found out during our latest huge update of all opportunities, what other apps are syncing, about which we didn’t have a clue. Hi Zapier and thank you for consuming most of our API calls!
Yes, we allow all users to use API and historically they could connect any app. So far we didn’t notice any huge loads on our side and always fit into the limits, but this was surprise for everyone across the company.
Load per application
Even when everything is in the limit, do you know how the load differs across the apps/users per day? Another handy view on the data.
When everything is roughly the same it shows nothing, when it is more or less it gets color. It doesn’t compare the usage across the app, it is just about how the respective apps is going compared to its baseline.
Anomalies?
Probably the next best thing. Volume spikes, new IPs, silent users, a lot of API errors and probably plenty of other anomalies we didn’t notice in our org. If you know your users are sitting at home the notification of new IP/country from which they connected should catch your attention. Obviously email notifications can be setup.
What extra I learnt
You knew about the „Connected Apps OAuth Usage“ in Setup which you should monitor and see which applications are connecting, right? I did as well, what I didn’t is that not all applications are listed there. It looks like it lists only oAuth connected apps which has refresh token, when the app does a login every single time (yes, weird) it isn’t listed there at all.
I also learnt – and this new feature allow this app to exists – that you can now enable Event Monitoring even without buying the add-on but it keeps just one day of history. Still great.