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Introduction

Apica has been the leader of synthetic transaction test creation since its inception in 2005. With the introduction of ZebraTester, Apica became the easiest low-to-no-code workflow test creation solution in the industry.

We are excited to continue that tradition of simple application test creation with the addition of two new API Tools, explicitly targeted for application development teams, leveraging standard tools and languages they already use.

As customers’ application environments become more expansive, it is more important than ever to test the individual components of those applications and do so using cloud-native practices.

With Apica’s API Tools, developers and monitoring teams now have a means of seamlessly integrating the creation and management of the service checks directly into the development pipeline, thus assuring those services meet the needs of the business.

The API Tool Check Solution

 The API Tools introduces two forms of checking your API’s or other HTTP methods:

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Postman ASM Check Runner

• In Short: Run any Postman collection in ASM

• Use Case: POSTMAN Users with many Collections and want to run them on the Apica ASM platform, so they can run their Collections without needing to export them and recreate them as ASM Checks.

• Command-line tool: customized for Apica but based on the standard Postman Newman utility.

  • We needed to extend Postman (via JavaScript) to better support chained APIs and API monitoring.

• Supports Collection and Environmental Variables, and all Authentication Methods

• Local data protection: NPM’s cryptify package can be used to encrypt/decrypt certificates, data files, and shared variables

• Decrypted data will only be in active session memory.

• Reporting: Collection Folders will define the Steps that the check reports on. Assertions are executed and included in the reports.

URL-XI Extended URL REST Tester

Use Case: API Testers who want to deploy more advanced API testing capabilities leveraging cloud-native practices, including advanced chaining and flow controls of the API requests.

• Command-line tool: The open-source code package, downloadable from npm, will run JSON-formatted Test Case/Scenario Definition files.

• A published schema defines the steps and how the flow of the tests is to be handled.

• Test Cases can be executed from the command line, with reports included with the output.

• Support

  1. JavaScript plugins or inline JS.

  2. Large Scale, high-frequency checks.

  3. Multiple Authentication included

     1. Basic

     2. API Key

     3. OAuth 2.0

     4. Signed AWS Requests

• Local data protection: npm’s cryptify package can be used to encrypt/decrypt certificates, data files, and shared variables. Decrypted data is only held inactive session memory.

• CLI Console Report

Here is an example of a report from the CLI Console

API Tools Compared to ZebraTester

API Tools are not a replacement for ZebraTester but API-specific testing and monitoring deployment.

Installation Requirements

ASM Postman Check Runner

• Installation of Node.js

• Installation of the ASM-PM-Runner from npm

• Installation of the cryptify file encryption/decryption package from npm

URL-XI - Extended URL Rest Tester

• Installation of Node.js

• Installation of the URL-XI from npm

• Installation of the cryptify file encryption/decryption package from npm