How often do you test the APIs?
Our monitoring system tests each API every minute and saves the test results.
Are you sure the API is really down?
When our system detects a failure a second test is run from another data center. This rules out local script/server/network errors and if both tests result in a failure we update the status and log an outage. Once a future test passes correctly the outage is considered to have ended.
What are you actually testing?
FedEx, UPS and USPS are tested by submitting a rate request for a 2 pound package shipped from Connecticut to California, DHL is tested with a 2 pound package shipped from Connecticut to France, and Canada Post is tested with a request for a 2kg package shipped from and to British Columbia. We then log the time it takes for the rates to be returned by the API. This simulates the same type of connection an online store does when it calculates shipping rates.
Which servers do you connect to?
DHL: xmlpi-ea.dhl.com FedEx: ws.fedex.com UPS: onlinetools.ups.com USPS: production.shippingapis.com Canada Post: soa-gw.canadapost.ca
If you have any questions which are not answered here, don't hesitate to contact us.
