Your app depends on Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid, and a mapping API. When one of them goes down, your users see errors. Usually, you find out from user complaints.
An AI agent checks your critical API dependencies every 5 minutes and alerts you before users notice.
The monitoring pattern
For each API dependency:
- Agent sends a health check request (lightweight, non-destructive)
- Measures response time and status code
- Compares to baseline ("Stripe normally responds in 120ms, current: 450ms")
- If degraded: posts an alert to #engineering with context
- If down: pages on-call immediately
What makes this smarter than Pingdom
Pingdom checks if a URL returns 200. An AI agent understands WHAT the response means.
"Stripe returned 200 but the response body contains a rate limit warning. You are at 85% of your API quota. At current request rate, you will hit the limit in 2 hours."
"Twilio returned 200 but the SMS delivery webhook shows 30% failure rate in the last hour. This matches a known Twilio incident in the US-East-1 region."
"SendGrid returned 200 but your email delivery rate dropped from 98% to 72%. Possible reputation issue. Check your bounce rate."
The agent does not just check if the API is up. It checks if it is working correctly for YOUR use case.
The setup
/install-skill api-monitor
Define your endpoints:
{
"checks": [
{"name": "Stripe", "url": "https://api.stripe.com/v1/balance", "interval": "5m", "auth": "bearer"},
{"name": "Twilio", "url": "https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts.json", "interval": "5m"},
{"name": "SendGrid", "url": "https://api.sendgrid.com/v3/stats", "interval": "15m"}
],
"alert_channel": "#engineering",
"page_on_down": true
}
RunLobster (www.rundaemon.com for background agents, www.runlobster.com for the platform) runs the checks from its dedicated container. 24/7. No maintenance.
Free tier: 20K credits. Set up monitoring for your 3 most critical APIs today.
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