Monitor your first API
What you'll achieve
By the end of this tutorial you will have a running API monitor that calls a real endpoint on a schedule, and you will be able to find and read its results — including the pass/fail status, latency breakdown, and response details.
Before you start
- An APIContext account — free tier is fine. Sign up at client.apimetrics.io
- An API endpoint to test. This tutorial uses
https://httpbin.org/get— a public, always-on endpoint that returns a simple JSON response with no authentication required.
Step 1: Create a project
Everything in APIContext lives inside a Project. When you log in you land on the Collections page, which lists all your projects grouped by organization.
- In the top bar, open the Organization picker and select your organization (also labeled Collection in some parts of the UI — they refer to the same entity).
- Click the Project picker and choose + Add Project.
- Give your project a name — for example, My First Monitor — and save it.
- The app will open your new project at Project Overview (
/home/).
Step 2: Add a monitor
A monitor is a configured API request that APIContext runs on your behalf. The Monitors list is found under CONFIGURE MONITORING in the left sidebar.
- In the left sidebar, under CONFIGURE MONITORING, click Monitors.
The page heading reads Monitors and lists all monitors defined in this project. - Click + Add New API Call.
An edit form opens. - Fill in the fields:
- Name — enter something descriptive, for example
httpbin GET. - Method — leave it set to GET (the default).
- URL — enter
https://httpbin.org/get.
- Name — enter something descriptive, for example
- Leave all other fields at their defaults. No authentication is needed for this endpoint.
- Click Save.
Your monitor now appears in the Monitors list.
Step 3: Run it once to verify
Before putting the monitor on a schedule, confirm it works with a manual run.
- On the monitor edit form (or from the Monitors list, open the monitor and go to its Edit tab), locate the Run Monitor Now button in the right rail.
- Click Run Monitor Now.
APIContext sends the request from a remote Node. There will be a short delay — typically a few seconds — while the call travels to the Node and back. - The right rail updates to show Last result: you should see Passed, HTTP 200, and a latency value.
If the result shows a failure, double-check the URL for typos. https://httpbin.org/get should always return HTTP 200.
Step 4: Add the monitor to a schedule
A manual run is a one-off check. To make this a true monitor — something that runs automatically and continuously — you need to add it to a Schedule.
- In the left sidebar, under CONFIGURE MONITORING, click Schedules.
- Click + New Schedule.
A modal opens with tabs Edit Schedule and Node Locations. - On the Edit Schedule tab, fill in:
- Name — for example,
Every 5 minutes – worldwide. - Frequency — select 12 per hour (once every 5 minutes) (the highest frequency on the free tier).
- Node Selection — leave it set to Worldwide.
- Name — for example,
- Click Save changes.
- The new schedule card appears in the Schedules list. Click the Scheduled Monitors count on the card to open the monitors dialog. In the Add to Schedule: row, choose your
httpbin GETmonitor from the Select Monitor or Workflow picker and click Add.
Your monitor is now running. Results will accumulate every five minutes.
Step 5: Read your first results
Results appear in two places: on the monitor itself, and in the project-wide results view.
On the monitor
- In the left sidebar, click Monitors.
- Click the row for
httpbin GETto expand it, then open the Results tab (/tests/test/<id>/results). - Each row is one execution. The columns show:
- Start time — when the call was made.
- Result Class —
Passed,Warning, orFailed. - HTTP status — should be
200. - Total time — end-to-end response time in milliseconds.
- Click a row to open the full result detail. You will see:
- A call result summary (pass/fail, HTTP code, trigger reason).
- Call duration breakdown — DNS lookup, TCP connect, processing time, and total time.
- The request that was sent and the response that came back, including the response body.
Project-wide
To see results across all monitors in the project:
- In the left sidebar, under INVESTIGATE, click All Call Results.
The page is titled Results / Monitor Results and shows every request made in this project. - Use the Result category filter to narrow to
PassedorFailedruns, and the Location filter to see results from a specific node.
Project Overview summary
On the Project Overview page (/home/), the Monitors in Schedules table shows a live summary row for your monitor with columns Quality, Availability %, Slow %, and Avg. Total latency. After a few runs these numbers will populate and give you an at-a-glance health view.
What's next?
You have a working monitor running on a schedule. Here are the natural next steps:
Understand what you just built
- Quality score explained — how the 0–9.99 CASC score is calculated
Go deeper on monitoring
- Add authentication to a monitor — set up OAuth 2, API key, or Fixed Bearer Token
- Set up alerts and webhooks — get notified on failures via email, Slack, or PagerDuty
- Configure project conditions — define what counts as a pass, warning, or failure for HTTP status, headers, and latency
- Put your monitor on a schedule — run automatically on a recurring interval
Expand coverage
- Create a workflow — chain multiple monitors into a sequence
- Add an OpenAPI specification — import your API spec and let APIContext measure conformance