API Monitoring Dashboard: Dashboards, TV Mode, Share Links and Printable Reports

This is lesson 9.12 of Shift-Left API in Depth, the product track of the learning center. In lesson 9.11, Run Triage explained one run's failures; here you step back to all of them. For the demo you need a trial edition of Shift-Left API, because dashboards come with the Enterprise edition and the trial, and the public sandbox store API.

How do you build an API monitoring dashboard from your test runs?

An API monitoring dashboard shows how your API's tests are doing, run after run: the pass rate, what's failing, and where. The question is how to turn a pile of test runs into one screen your whole team can watch, and share. In Shift-Left API you don't build it by hand: the dashboards read the runs you already have.

What a monitoring dashboard shows

A monitoring dashboard turns test runs into a few numbers you can watch. Picture an orders API over fourteen days: the pass rate, coverage, response times and failures, the pass rate run after run, and each environment. One number moving the wrong way tells you where to look.

Different people need different views of the same runs:

• A CIO wants quality and risk.
• A QA lead wants coverage and stability.
• DevOps wants pipeline health.
• A release manager wants the gates.

And a wall display keeps it in front of the whole team.

Watch it, or send it

There are two ways to use a dashboard. Watch it on a wall display in the team room, or on your own screen each morning. Or send it: a share link to colleagues on your team's server, and a report file, or a PDF, for an email or the record.

Five runs of one pack

The demo project, Store API Dashboards, is built from the sandbox store's spec, with six read tests in one pack, Store API smoke.

1. Click Reporting in the top bar and search for the pack. It has run five times against the live sandbox, newest first.
2. Read the results: the latest run passed four of six tests, the two before it five, and the first two all six.

Between those runs the store changed: the Wireless Mouse's price went from 24.99 to 29.99, and later an order was deleted. The tests caught both.

Read the Tester dashboard

1. Click Analytics. The Dashboards tab shows a dashboard for each role.
2. Open the persona list: CIO, CTO, Head of Dev, DevOps and SRE, and the rest, each with its own widgets. Pick Tester.
3. Set Time Range to 7 Days and Project to Store API Dashboards.

Total runs reads thirty: five runs of six tests. The pass rate is eighty-seven percent, with no flaky tests. Pipeline Progression shows the Development environment: twenty-six of thirty passed, so it carries a warning. Below it, Top Failing Tests: Read the Wireless Mouse failed in three of its five runs (that's its price check), and Read an order failed once. One screen shows what broke, and where to look first.

Export the numbers, or print a PDF

Click Export. CSV and JSON give you the numbers as data. Export as HTML saves a print-friendly report, and Print sends that same report to the print dialog, where you can save it as a PDF.

Share the dashboard

Click Share. In the demo, Shift-Left API runs on the same computer, so a web link would open only there, and the dialog offers what does travel:

1. Download report saves one HTML file with this dashboard's numbers, to attach to an email or a chat.
2. A link opens the same dashboard in a colleague's own desktop app.
3. If your team shares a server, enter its address, and share links work for everyone.

To see a share link's options, click Create a link anyway. Give it a title, choose who can open it (anyone with the link, logged-in users, or a password), and when it expires, for example seven days. Click Generate Link. The note under the link says it points at this computer until an administrator sets the address your team uses.

Open the downloaded report in a browser: thirty test runs, twenty-six passed, four failed, and the two failing tests with their failure rates. Its button opens the dashboard in the desktop app, and printing it from the browser gives you a PDF.

Put it on the wall with TV Mode

1. Back on the dashboard, click TV Mode.
2. Under Dashboards to rotate through, Tester is ticked; tick DevOps and SRE as well.
3. Under Projects to include, keep just your project.
4. Set Rotation Interval to thirty seconds. The dark theme is recommended for a TV.
5. Click Start TV Mode.

The dashboard fills the screen, with a clock and the time of its last refresh. The widgets refresh every thirty seconds, and every thirty seconds it moves to the next dashboard. The right arrow key moves on now: DevOps and SRE shows each environment's passes and failures, and the project's pass rate in each. Press Space to pause the rotation, and click Exit TV Mode to go back.

Try it yourself

With a trial edition, import the sandbox spec, put a few read tests in a pack, and run it a few times. In Analytics, open Dashboards, pick Tester and your project. Export it, or Share it and download the report. Then start TV Mode with two dashboards.

Recap

• An API monitoring dashboard turns every run of your tests into one screen: the pass rate, the failing tests, each environment.
• In Shift-Left API, Dashboards gives each role its own view, by project and time range.
• Export and Share give you the data, a report you can print to PDF and share links, and TV Mode puts it on the wall: API endpoint monitoring from the tests you already run.

Next, in lesson 9.13, you send many requests at once, with load, stress, spike and soak tests built from the tests you already have. For monitoring beyond test runs, read monitoring API performance in production.