5.4. Monitoring and maintenance
Publishers are RECOMMENDED to follow operational best practice when hosting API catalog(s), including but not limited to:¶
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Availability. The Publisher should monitor availability of the API catalog, and consider alternate means to resolve requests to /.well-known/api-catalog during planned downtime of hosts.¶
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Performance. Although the performance of APIs listed in an API catalog can demand high transactions per second and low-latency response, the retrieval of the API catalog itself to discover those APIs is less likely to incur strict performance demands. That said, the Publisher should monitor the response time to fulfil a request for the API catalog, and determine any necessary improvements (as with any other Web resource the Publisher serves). For large API catalogs, the Publisher should consider the techniques described in Section 5.3.¶
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Usage. Since the goal of the api-catalog well-known URI is to facilitate discovery of APIs, the Publisher may wish to correlate requests to the /.well-known/api-catalog URI with subsequent requests to the API URIs listed in the catalog.¶
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Current data. The Publisher should include the removal of stale API entries from the API catalog as part of their API release lifecycle. The Publisher MAY decide to include metadata regarding legacy API versions or deprecated APIs to help users of those APIs discover up-to-date alternatives.¶
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Correct metadata. The Publisher should include human and/or automated checks for syntax errors in the API catalog. Automated checks include format validation (e.g. to ensure valid JSON syntax) and linting to enforce business rules - such as removing duplicate entries and ensuring descriptions are correctly named with valid values. A proofread of the API catalog as part of the API release lifecycle is RECOMMENDED to detect any errors in business grammar (for example, an API entry that is described with valid syntax, but has been allocated an incorrect or outdated description.)¶