Product News

Live API inspector: Full visibility for sync errors | Census

Katy Yuan
Katy Yuan February 24, 2022

Katy is a Product Marketing Manager at Census who loves diving into startups, SaaS technology, and modern data platforms. When she's not working, you can find her playing pickleball or Ultimate Frisbee.

Have you ever heard a product announcement start with: I hope you don’t use this new feature?

At Census, we’re anything but conventional. 😉

Something else that defines us is our commitment to end-to-end observability. All of our customers can sync with confidence and proactively catch errors with detailed alerting and logging.

To provide even more transparency, we’ve added a Live API Inspector, which helps data teams dig deep and debug issues when your API calls aren’t behaving the way you expect them to.

We hope you never have to use it, but if you do, it's the best inspector out there.

👉 What is it?

Our Live API Inspector gives you row-level visibility into the API calls Census makes to the destination service to sync your data, so you can track and fix errors as they happen in real time.

Data teams using Census can now monitor and debug any problematic syncs, and get ahead of data issues proactively. Ensure the consistency, reliability, and observability of the data you’re sending to your destinations, and never wonder why your rows failed again!

API Inspector is available today on all plans (including free) at no cost to you. 🙌

🔎 “X-ray” your data with more transparency around API requests and responses

API Inspector helps data wranglers play Data Detective to figure out what failed in their pipeline.

Answer questions like:Pre-sync visibility

  • I’m setting up a new Census sync and want to understand what API calls it makes

Post-sync visibility and debugging

  • Where in the sync did breaks happen (which step)?
  • Why did the sync break?
  • Which record(s) caused a sync to fail?
  • Why did certain records fail to sync properly?
  • What records failed or were skipped?
  • Did we send too much data / too many requests?

🥇 The Census Advantage: What’s unique about our API Inspector?

Connector Coverage

We support API Inspector on 90% of our connectors, more than any other reverse ETL platform out there. 💪

Data Format Coverage

Different destinations require different formats for data to be sent. We support JSON, CSV, and plain text payloads, which means you don't have to worry about any destination not being supported because it uses a different data format.

The Inspector also supports viewing those data formats in a more legible way, making them functionally easier to use.

📔 Check out the product doc for supported destinations, or start using Census for free today.

🔮 The Future: What’s coming next?

The API Inspector provides API-call level visibility into the health of your syncs - but we’re not stopping there!

At Census, we see every day how important observability is to operational analytics. We have a long roadmap ahead to provide even further detail and finer grain controls to support your auditing, debugging and compliance needs. Stay tuned :)

If you’re an existing Census customer and would like early access to this next release, contact us by chat, email, or Slack.

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