In today’s cloud-native world, third-party APIs are everywhere. Payments, notifications, search, AI, analytics as modern applications are built on a web of external services. But what happens when one of those APIs slows down, starts throwing errors, or gets rate-limited? Suddenly, your users are facing issues, and you’re stuck asking:
Is it the third-party API or my code?❗
For most teams, this is a daily pain point. Debugging external dependencies is a maze of guesswork, fragmented dashboards, and finger-pointing between vendors and engineering. Until now, there’s been no easy and unified, developer-first way to monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot third-party APIs alongside your own services.
Today, we’re changing that. Third Party API Monitoring in SigNoz, powered by OpenTelemetry semantics, brings clarity, correlation, and control to every external call your system makes.
Why Third Party API Monitoring Matters
Third-party APIs are critical to your business, but they’re also outside your control. When something breaks, you need answers-fast:
- Did a payment provider start returning 5xx errors?
- Is your email vendor rate limiting you?
- Are checkout requests failing because of a slow downstream API?
- Which of your services are impacted when a vendor has an outage?
Traditional monitoring tools fall short here. They might show you aggregate error rates or latency, but they can’t connect the dots between external failures and your own services, or help you drill down to the root cause with full trace-level context.
What Makes SigNoz Third Party API Monitoring Different?
SigNoz is built for developers who want full-stack observability - logs, metrics, and traces in one place. With our new Third Party API Monitoring, you can:
See all external domains your services call
Instantly visualize every third-party API your system touches, with real-time stats on error rates, latency, and request volumes.
Correlate internal and external metrics
View third-party API metrics right alongside your own service metrics, so you can spot if a vendor is causing a spike in errors or latency.
Drill down by endpoint, status code, and service
Filter down to specific endpoints, see which services are calling them, and break down results by status code (e.g., 200, 400, 429, 500).
Spot rate limiting and error spikes
Instantly see if a vendor is rate-limiting you or returning errors, and download audit reports to share with your vendors.
Jump straight from errors to traces
Click any error or latency spike and go directly to the relevant traces, with all filters applied-no more hunting across dashboards.
Export metrics to dashboards and share with non-engineering teams
Make third-party API health visible to customer success or business teams, even if they don’t have access to engineering dashboards.
How It Works: ❤️ OTel
SigNoz leverages the latest OpenTelemetry semantic conventions (v1.33.0), ensuring all external API calls are instrumented and attributed using standardized attributes such as http.method, http.target, and http.scheme, as defined by the OpenTelemetry specification. Whether your app is using HTTP, gRPC, or RPC, SigNoz identifies domains, endpoints, and status codes masking sensitive data and normalizing paths for clarity and performance.
Automatic correlation:
All external calls are mapped to the services making them, so you always know which internal components are affected by a vendor issue.
Flexible filtering:
Hide internal traffic to focus on true third-party dependencies, or slice by domain, endpoint, or status code to pinpoint exactly where things are breaking.
First-class navigation:
Jump seamlessly between API monitoring, service dashboards, and traces because correlation is built-in, not bolted on.
Real-World Impact: Customer Stories
Kiwi: With dozens of banking integrations, Kiwi uses SigNoz to track every third-party API call, monitor success rates, and set up immediate alerts for failures. When a bank’s API goes down, Kiwi’s team gets notified instantly and can share detailed reports with their partners-no more guesswork, just actionable insights.
Bands: Managing over 50 third-party integrations, Bands leverages SigNoz for success rate tracking, latency metrics, and anomaly detection. When a vendor starts failing, Bands knows exactly which of their services are affected and can respond before users feel the pain.
Getting Started
Out of the box, you get immediate visibility into all third-party API calls made by your services. Error rates, latency, request volumes, and more are automatically tracked and visualized.
The only prerequisite is instrumentation: add OpenTelemetry libraries to your application and configure them to export telemetry data to your SigNoz backend.
What’s Next
We’re committed to making third-party API monitoring even more powerful. On our roadmap:
- Full support for all OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, across all languages
- Direct alerting from API monitoring views
- Historical alert history for vendor SLAs
- Enhanced dashboard export and sharing
Try It and Tell Us What You Think
We built this feature based on feedback from teams who were tired of flying blind when it came to third-party dependencies. Now, we want to hear from you.
Try it out, break it, push its limits, and let us know what you love or what you want to see next.
Join the SigNoz community on Slack or GitHub, share your experience, and help us shape the future of observability. Your feedback directly drives what we build next.
Launch Week 4.0
Check out all updates of Launch Week 4.0.
