Hey, Tim here. I was the one talking about this on the podcast. As I mentioned in the podcast, the monitoring of APIs was a method that we quickly found out didn't really scale or help. It suffered from a few issues, mainly the vendors were updating their api's but not their docs. The way that we tackled it in the end was to let things fail. We have actually taken this approach with many things i.e. fail, but have a method which cleans up after the new changes have been deployed.

The way we handle it now is that our integration will start throwing serialisation errors. This will then have our platform send a probe to get a RAW response from the system and then we let the admin see side by side, the old data and the new data. This allows the developers to schedule a new deployment to make these fixes. The good thing is that when the new deployment is made, the orchestration around it will handle fixing the data that it couldn't resolve while the serialisation was failing.

We do get other benefits out of this, including the ability to better handle integrations where you have absolutely no idea what to expect from the API e.g. old Oracle, IBM products that don't have discovery endpoints like Dynamics, Salesforce etc does.

Our recommendation after managing so many integrations is "let things fail". Embrace a data integration pattern that allows things to fail.

Swagger/OpenAPI goes a fair way towards solving this problem by recommending semver, but it's far from widely adopted...

I'd be really interested in listening to that podcast. Are you able to share a link?

API versioning is the contract by which this is supposed to be managed...

I disagree.

All GUI tools are limited and soon you get out of the comfort zone if you use them for more then 2 things.

That is the main reason I created AU framework[^1] for chocolatey which main choco repo uses to daily watch and update 250+ packages[^2]. Previously they used Ketarin tool which is GUI and was very limited and hard to on-board too. Its basically this, but you program simple PowerShell functions that can check for changes using whatever available in .NET.

The same goes for any declarative tool - you simply need a good programming language all the time.

[^1] https://github.com/majkinetor/au [^2] https://gist.github.com/choco-bot/a14b1e5bfaf70839b338eb1ab7...

I completely agree, would be interesting to see if a Qt GUI can be made with this as the underlying engine.

I use Distill for this which is implemented as a browser extension. Works pretty well: https://distill.io/

Have you looked at the README? It's not just for web page changes.

https://vsoch.github.io/watchme/watchers/index.html

DiffBot does something like this. https://www.diffbot.com/

I was wondering if someone would mention RSS (or Atom).

What I'd like to see is a site that generates diffs from webpage changes, and makes them available as an RSS feed you can subscribe to.

Ideally this would be a free service, and I wouldn't mind if the RSS entries were prepended with adverts (or required you to click through to a page hosted by the service in order to see the diff, surrounded by adverts).

Was it Kimono Labs? I remember years ago that everyone was raving about them, so I decided to give it a try. It was simple, nice, and a pleasure to work with. Fortunately for them, they got acquired a couple of years ago.

I liked changdetection.com which they acquired(?)... it was to-the-point and possibly the fastest-loading non-trivial site I knew.

Before GitHub made it possible to watch for releases only, I used blogtrottr [1] for a few repositories (just another alternative).

[1]: https://blogtrottr.com/

Ah nice. I was just going to ask what tool would be good for checking that my wife's blog is still show the right posts (and not something a hacker has modified). I'll check these things out.

Yes, and you can just chain together ftp, curlftpfs, and svn to make Dropbox.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224