What to look for when evaluating integration observability tools

Welcome to another edition of the Integration Insider—a weekly newsletter that provides the insights you need to build, maintain, and manage product integrations successfully.

In this week's edition we'll break down what you should look for in an integration observability solution.

Note: This article originally appeared on our blog.

As you look to keep tabs on your integrations’ health, you’ll likely need to invest in an integration observability tool.

To help you pick the best tool for your organization, we'll break down the features and capabilities you should look for during your vendor evaluations.

Ease of syncing with your engineers’ tech stack

Your engineers likely use a specific set of applications to identify, track, and resolve issues.?

An integration monitoring tool may be able to surface issues to these tools so that your engineers don’t have to log into additional platforms and can manage integration issues within their normal flow of work.

For example, Merge offers an Issues Webhook that allows you to feed the issues discovered in Merge’s Integration Observability tooling to whatever applications your engineers want in real-time. Moreover, these POST requests include insights on individual integration issues, enabling your engineers to troubleshoot them faster and escalate any if necessary.

A single solution for building and monitoring integrations

Your organization shouldn’t have to invest in separate tools for building and monitoring integrations. These capabilities should be consolidated in a single UI that makes it easy for users to navigate between monitoring and building integrations.?

This two-in-one approach can save you money, as you can purchase software in a bundle package. And it can save you time, as you don’t have to go through the ?process of purchasing two vendors, and your team won't have to navigate between each platform.?

Intuitive UX to help non-technical teams monitor integrations

Your engineers likely can’t afford to allocate enough time towards monitoring individual integrations, which can translate to long-lasting integration issues that hurt your employee and/or customer experience.

To take this burden off developers' plates and enable organizations to monitor integrations effectively, 3rd-party tools are increasingly making their monitoring features intuitive and easy for customer success and support teams to use.

Moreover, integration monitoring vendors often provide training sessions for customers’ success and support teams, all but ensuring that they’re able to perform monitoring-related work independently and successfully.

For instance, Merge went onsite for BILL, a leading financial ops platform for SMBs, to, among other things, train their support team on Merge’s Integration Observability tooling. This freed up BILL’s engineers and PMs from not only monitoring the integrations but also enabling their colleagues in support to perform this work.

Related: How BILL uses Merge to offer 40+ HRIS integrations that save customers time on managing users

Built-in issue detection functionality

To help your teams address issues quickly, the integration monitoring tool should provide functionality around automatically diagnosing issues.?

In addition, the monitoring tool should provide the specific steps for resolving an issue via concise copy. For product integrations , this’ll allow your customer-facing employees to copy the text and share it with the affected customers; while for internal integrations, it’ll allow your own team to skip a few steps in your resolution process.

Searchable and comprehensive logging

As part of its solution offering, the integration monitoring tool should provide comprehensive logs that record all of the critical details from an API request, such as the method that was used and the headers that were included. It should also include key details from the API response, such as the status or response code , headers, and the body.

Equally important, you should be able to quickly filter the logs across different dimensions, from status codes to dates to integrations to methods to organization (for customer-facing integrations). That way, your team can easily find the relevant log(s) when they need to drill down on an issue and suss out its root cause.

Manage your customer-facing integrations effectively with Merge

Merge’s Integration Observability features provide all the functionality you need to deliver reliable and performant product integrations. Moreover, Merge makes it easy to scale your customer-facing integration builds by offering a unified API that lets you access hundreds of integrations across categories, including HRIS, ATS, accounting, and ticketing.

You can learn more about Merge by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts .