Meet the new and improved API Dashboard

There’s a lot that can happen when apps move to production—outages, bugs, and a slew of other unforeseen scenarios. Isolating the specific events and activity to troubleshoot can be an elusive process that leads to unnecessary delays and downtime.

With the rebuild of our API Dashboard, we were excited to invest in features that would allow you to debug faster while reducing any risk to your applications and customers. On top of robust and interactive charts to speed these processes up, we also baked in better ways to manage your account and applications.

How to access the new Dropbox Sign API Dashboard

Have you already tried logging into your account to visit your dashboard? If not, here are some easy to follow steps on how to first accomplish this step:

1. Create an account on hellosign.com/developers
2. Once logged in, click the “API” hyperlink located in the left hand navigation
3. Click on the “View API Dashboard” button
4. Your dashboard UI will populate
   

If your API dashboard is empty, it most likely means that you still need to send your first API call. Here’s a quick walkthrough on how.

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Monitor and manage the health of your integrations

We don’t expect you to hunt down information across various logs, so we aggregated the most critical event and request activity into the dashboard. Now, you can view charts that report on API activity, Signature Request Status, and Signature Request Usage—all of which offer customizable filters to view information more specific to your investigation, and popovers to provide more detail on individual requests.

Along with having a holistic view of your API and Signature Request activity, the dashboard now surfaces updates about system performance and latency that could impact your integration. With the new notification banner, you’ll be able to improve your reaction times and mitigate risk for you and your customers.

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Debug and troubleshoot faster

Let’s walk through a typical scenario where you’re working through an issue, and how the API Dashboard would be instrumental to your investigation efforts. Say you built an integration that uses embedded signing, and you’ve been receiving reports from some of your users that they’re unable to complete signature requests on your site.

First, let’s start with diagnosing when and where the error occurred. Just glancing at the API Requests chart, you can already see some irregular activity spikes in the line graph reporting on “Failed Requests”. Here is where the option to filter based on “Endpoint” comes in handy—in this filtered view you can see your app’s activity is allocated by endpoint and build a better understanding around the success and failure rates of requests made to each of them.

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Naturally, your next step here is to gather a bit more detail into how many of these requests were successfully made versus failed. The chart reports that all of the requests made to the endpoint used to create an embedded signature request (/signature_request/create_embedded) were in fact successful, while only half of the API requests to the endpoint used to fetch an embedded sign URL (/embedded/sign_url/{signature_id}) for those embedded signature requests were successful.

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Knowing this, you can begin to connect the dots between your investigation and the recent change you made to your application. It’s clear that this resulted in causing a number of these API requests to fail, and ultimately prevented some of your users from completing their signature requests on your site. Now, you know exactly what changes to roll back on your end, and restore request success rate to 100%.

After deploying a modified version of the update that was previously rolled back, you can get back to monitoring the health of your integration using the API dashboard while ensuring the same problem doesn’t occur again.

Staying on top of usage & billing

In the Quota Usage section, you can view a breakdown of consumption across Total Signature Requests, SMS for Signer Authentication, and Templates. You can also view your billing type and refresh date to easily stay on top of your quota.

This section also gives you the ability to sort usage based on API app. If your customers use your integration through their own individual API apps, the ability to sort API usage based on API app will be extremely useful in determining how much activity to attribute to each user.

We’d love to hear from you as you test out the new API Dashboard—visit our feedback channel through our Discord server. For more on the dashboard, view the documentation.