apidepth-python

Track outbound API latency, error rates, and rate limit quota across your third-party vendors — Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, Twilio, GitHub, and more.

Zero config for supported vendors. No code changes to your existing HTTP calls.

How it works

Real traffic, not synthetic probes. Every outbound HTTP call your application makes to a known vendor is timed at the socket level, tagged with outcome and environment metadata, and batched to the Apidepth collector in the background. The latency number in your dashboard is the number your users feel — not a probe running from a data center somewhere else.

Fleet benchmarking. Because Apidepth aggregates anonymized timing data across all customers, your dashboard shows not just "your Stripe p95 is 420ms" but "the fleet median is 280ms — you may have a regional routing issue." That comparison is only possible with real traffic from real deployments, which is why no synthetic probe tool can offer it.

Proof of Innocence. When all endpoints to a vendor spike simultaneously, Apidepth surfaces a verdict: isolated (the spike is yours alone — likely your code or infrastructure) or tracking (the fleet sees the same thing — vendor-side). The attribution card makes it fast to tell ops "it's Stripe, not us."

Alerts and weekly digest. Apidepth fires alerts when vendor latency crosses your configured threshold and sends a weekly digest summarizing what changed. Monitoring without alerting is passive; this is working for you.

Rate limit intelligence. Apidepth tracks 429 patterns and projects quota burn-down before you hit the ceiling — with a burn-down card showing time-to-throttle at current request rate.

Installation

pip install apidepth

For requests instrumentation (most common):

pip install "apidepth[requests]"

For httpx instrumentation:

pip install "apidepth[httpx]"

Getting started

Django

Add to INSTALLED_APPS and configure in settings.py:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "apidepth.integrations.django",
]

APIDEPTH = {
    "api_key": env("APIDEPTH_API_KEY"),
    "environment": env("DJANGO_ENV", default="development"),
}

Flask

from flask import Flask
from apidepth.integrations.flask import Apidepth

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config["APIDEPTH_API_KEY"] = os.environ["APIDEPTH_API_KEY"]
app.config["APIDEPTH_ENVIRONMENT"] = "production"

Apidepth(app)

Standalone / scripts

import apidepth
from apidepth import registry_loader

apidepth.configure(
    api_key=os.environ["APIDEPTH_API_KEY"],
    environment="production",
)
apidepth.instrument()       # call before any outbound HTTP
registry_loader.load_and_start()  # loads remote vendor registry + starts refresh thread

import requests
resp = requests.get("https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges/ch_abc123", ...)

load_and_start() fetches the latest vendor registry from the network (with a local disk cache fallback) and starts a background refresh thread. Without it, only the six bundled vendors are recognised. Django and Flask integrations call this automatically.

For Gunicorn / uWSGI, call Collector.register_fork_safety() once before the server forks so each worker gets its own flush thread:

from apidepth.collector import Collector
Collector.register_fork_safety()

Configuration

What gets captured

Every outbound HTTP request to a recognised vendor produces one event:

What is never captured

• Request or response bodies
• Request or response headers (including Authorization)
• Query string parameters
• Any credential, token, or secret your application uses to authenticate with a vendor
• User identifiers or PII of any kind

Path normalization strips resource IDs before the event leaves your server. /v1/charges/ch_3Ox4Kz2e becomes /v1/charges/:id.

Supported vendors

Additional vendors are loaded from the remote registry every 6 hours.

Custom vendors

apidepth.configure(
    extra_vendors={"payments-api": "api.payments.internal"},
)

Rate limit tracking

The SDK extracts quota state from response headers and includes it in every event. Supported header families (checked in priority order):

• OpenAI / Anthropic: x-ratelimit-remaining-requests, x-ratelimit-limit-requests, x-ratelimit-reset-requests
• GitHub: x-ratelimit-remaining, x-ratelimit-limit, x-ratelimit-reset
• IETF draft / HubSpot: ratelimit-remaining, ratelimit-limit, ratelimit-reset
• Stripe / generic 429: retry-after

Reset values are normalised to epoch milliseconds regardless of the source format (Unix timestamp, seconds-from-now, OpenAI duration strings like "1m30s").

Debugging

from apidepth.collector import Collector

print(Collector.instance().stats())
# {
#   'queue_size': 0,
#   'consecutive_failures': 0,
#   'total_dropped': 0,
#   'last_flush_at': 1747008000.123,
# }

Framework compatibility

Python compatibility

Python 3.9–3.13. No required runtime dependencies (stdlib only). requests and httpx are optional instrumentation targets detected at runtime.

Known differences from the Ruby gem

cold_start is always false

The Ruby gem tags the first outbound request on each TCP connection with cold_start: true using Net::HTTP#started?. The Apidepth collector uses this flag to exclude DNS + TCP + TLS handshake overhead from latency percentile calculations (p50/p95/p99), keeping those metrics representative of steady-state vendor performance.

Neither requests (backed by urllib3) nor httpx exposes a public API for detecting whether the underlying socket is a keep-alive reuse. The Python SDK therefore always sends cold_start: false.

Practical impact depends on your traffic pattern:

The raw duration values are accurate — only the percentile statistics are affected. If cold-start exclusion matters for your environment, filter those events manually in your dashboard (e.g. a warm-up request flag in thread-local state) until the underlying libraries expose the required connection-state API.