How to Check an API's Uptime First
By Kooperativa Engineering
"99.9% uptime" printed on a marketing page is a claim with no way to verify it independently. It could be measured against an internal dashboard nobody outside the company ever sees, over a time window chosen after the fact. A public status page, updated automatically from the real backend rather than edited by hand, is the only version of this claim that is actually checkable.
What a real status page should show
The bar for a status page being genuinely useful, rather than decorative, comes down to a few specifics.
- Response time history, not just an up/down indicator, since a technically "up" API that takes eight seconds to respond is not actually usable in production.
- A refresh interval short enough that an outage shows up within minutes, not hours.
- Historical incident log, so a pattern of recurring issues is visible rather than only the current moment.
- Whether it is connected to the actual production backend or to a separate synthetic check that could stay green while the real API is degraded.
A cheap verification step before you commit
Before integrating any API you plan to depend on, use its own health or status endpoint, most APIs expose one, as a load-bearing check in your own monitoring, not just a one-time glance at their dashboard. If they do not offer one at all, that absence is itself useful information about how seriously uptime is treated internally.
curl "https://kooperativa.io/api/v1/health"
# { "ok": true }Why this matters more for data APIs specifically
An enrichment or search API sitting on the critical path of a CRM sync, a signup flow, or a real-time lookup means its downtime becomes your downtime, silently, unless it is monitored independently of the vendor's own self-reported numbers. Wiring a status page or health check into your own alerting closes that gap.
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