How Box Improved API Observability and Customer Experience

Independent internet observability helped Box validate customer experiences and improve API reliability at scale.

Box delivers cloud content management through web applications, partner integrations, and billions of API calls each day. Maintaining reliable customer experiences across those services requires visibility beyond internal infrastructure.

Following a major service incident, Box realized its internal monitoring didn’t always reflect what customers experienced through API integrations. To close that gap, the team implemented LogicMonitor’s Catchpoint to independently monitor API performance from the customer’s perspective.

Today, Catchpoint helps Box investigate customer-reported issues faster, validate internal telemetry, and support ongoing investments in reliability using independent performance data.

Challenge: Limited Visibility Into API Customer Experiences

In 2018, Box experienced broad service issues. While investigating the incident, the team realized its internal understanding of the issue didn’t always align with what customers experienced through API integrations.

“We had a good handle on the experience with our web app but were in the dark when it came to what customers experienced on the other end of API integrations,” said Dennhardt. “To better understand and serve our API customers, we needed a more accurate representation of their experiences.”

Why Box Chose Catchpoint

Following the incident, Box evaluated active observability solutions that could provide an independent view of API performance from the customer’s perspective.

Catchpoint stood out by providing:

Global synthetic monitoring
Independent validation of customer-reported issues
Custom dashboards for operational visibility
Performance data without relying on third-party reporting tools

Results: Faster Investigation and Better API Visibility

After implementing Catchpoint, Box improved its ability to investigate customer-facing issues and understand API performance at scale.

Key outcomes included:

Earlier detection of customer-facing performance issues
Faster investigation using independent performance data
Improved visibility into website and API health
Greater confidence when making reliability investments

“We handle three to five billion public API calls per day,” said Dennhardt. “We fire Catchpoint tests for a few days and compare the results to our broader set of data, which allows us to identify problems and discover new insights.”

See How Box Improved API Observability

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