Released with no formal announcement in IRIS preview release 2019.4 is the /api/monitor service exposing IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. Big news for anyone wanting to use IRIS metrics as part of their monitoring and alerting solution. The API is a component of the new IRIS System Alerting and Monitoring (SAM) solution that will be released in an upcoming version of IRIS.

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Article
· Aug 14, 2019 9m read
Introducing InterSystems API Manager

As you might have heard, we just introduced the InterSystems API Manager (IAM); a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform™, enabling you to monitor, control and govern traffic to and from web-based APIs within your IT infrastructure. In case you missed it, here is the link to the announcement.

In this article, I will show you how to set up IAM and highlight some of the many capabilities IAM allows you to leverage.

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The following steps show you how to display a sample list of metrics available from the /api/monitor service.

In the last post, I gave an overview of the service that exposes IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. The post shows how to set up and run IRIS preview release 2019.4 in a container and then list the metrics.


This post assumes you have Docker installed. If not, go and do that now for your platform :)

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In this article, I would like to talk about the spec-first approach to REST API development.

While traditional code-first REST API development goes like this:

  • Writing code
  • REST-enabling it
  • Documenting it (as a REST API)

Spec-first follows the same steps but reverse. We start with a spec, also doubling as documentation, generate a boilerplate REST app from that and finally write some business logic.

This is advantageous because:

  • You always have relevant and useful documentation for external or frontend developers who want to use your REST API
  • Specification created in OAS (Swagger) can be imported into a variety of tools allowing editing, client generation, API Management, Unit Testing and automation or simplification of many other tasks
  • Improved API architecture. In code-first approach, API is developed method by method so a developer can easily lose track of the overall API architecture, however with the spec-first developer is forced to interact with an API from the position if API consumer which usually helps with designing cleaner API architecture
  • Faster development - as all boilerplate code is automatically generated you won't have to write it, all that's left is developing business logic.
  • Faster feedback loops - consumers can get a view of the API immediately and they can easier offer suggestions simply by modifying the spec

Let's develop our API in a spec-first approach!

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InterSystems API Management (IAM) - a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, enables you to monitor, control and govern traffic to and from web-based APIs within your IT infrastructure. In case you missed it, here is the link to the announcement. And here's an article explaining how to start working with IAM.

In this article, we would use InterSystems API Management to Load Balance an API.

In our case, we have 2 InterSystems IRIS instances with /api/atelier REST API that we want to publish for our clients.

There are many different reasons why we might want to do that, such as:

  • Load balancing to spread the workload across servers
  • Blue-green deployment: we have two servers, one "prod", other "dev" and we might want to switch between them
  • Canary deployment: we might publish the new version only on one server and move 1% of clients there
  • High availability configuration
  • etc.
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This quick guide shows how to serve HTTPS requests with InterSystems API Management. Advantage here is that you have your certs on one separated server and you don't need to configure each backend web-server separately.

Here's how:

1. Buy the domain name.

2. Adjust DNS records from your domain to the IAM IP address.

3. Generate HTTPS certificate and private key. I use Let's Encrypt - it's free.

4. Start IAM if you didn't already.

5. Send this request to IAM:

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PHP, from the beginning of its time, is renowned (and criticized) for supporting integration with a lot of libraries, as well as with almost all the DB existing on the market. However, for some mysterious reasons, it did not support hierarchical databases on the globals.

Globals are structures for storing hierarchical information. They are somewhat similar to key-value database with the only difference being that the key can be multi-level:

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