Today I want to take a short break to discuss an interesting idea for monitoring API calls. APIs are ubiquitous and their usage is relevant to operations, development and test teams. There are various kinds of tools available for monitoring and some come with facilitators such as Mashery and Splunk. These are often based on non-intrusive capture, index and search mechanisms or a subset of them. Often they are cumbersome to use, involve heavy investment and don't provide realtime information.  But I want to talk about a specific monitoring usage similar to realtime chart of call volumes. The APIs I want to target for my monitoring have a log counter i.e they log the number of calls to an API identified by its name in a table in a database for read access by all. In this case, I'm interested in charts similar to resource monitoring on desktops