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()

CLI

The SDK ships two subcommands for setup and connectivity verification.

python -m apidepth setup

Interactive wizard that detects your framework (Django, FastAPI, or generic), generates the correct initializer snippet, and optionally writes it to disk.

python -m apidepth setup

For CI/CD pipelines, skip all prompts:

python -m apidepth setup --api-key $APIDEPTH_API_KEY --no-prompt

python -m apidepth test

Sends a synthetic test event to the collector and confirms the pipeline is working end-to-end. Reads APIDEPTH_API_KEY (and optionally APIDEPTH_COLLECTOR_URL) from the environment. Prints the round-trip time on success, or a per-failure-mode error message with next steps on failure.

python -m apidepth test
# ✓ received in 142ms
# Visit your dashboard: https://apidepth.io/dashboard

Exits with code 1 on any error (bad key, unreachable, SSL failure, timeout).

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.

Differences from the Ruby gem

cold_start detection

The Ruby gem uses Net::HTTP#started? to tag the first request on each TCP connection. The Python SDK cannot inspect socket reuse via a public API, so it uses a per-process host registry instead: the first request to each hostname within a process lifetime is tagged cold_start: true. This accurately captures DNS + TCP + TLS overhead for the cases that matter most — process startup and serverless invocations.

Forked workers (gunicorn, uWSGI) each get a fresh registry via os.register_at_fork, so the first request per worker is correctly tagged cold.

Known limitation: mid-process connection re-establishment after a keep-alive timeout is not detected. For long-lived, low-throughput services this means occasional reconnect latency won't be excluded from percentile calculations. For high-throughput services and serverless workers the behaviour is equivalent to the Ruby gem.