API Gateway high error percentage

Check for detecting high error rates in your API Gateway endpoints. Some errors are inevitable and should be handled from the application side.

Dashbird continuously monitors and analyses your serverless applications to ensure reliability, cost and performance optimisation and alignment with the Well Architected Framework.

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Severity: CRITICAL
Interval: 15 minutes
Time slot: 60 minutes
Threshold: 5% error rate

Metrics:
METRICS.APIGATEWAY.APIGATEWAY_REQUESTS
METRICS.APIGATEWAY.APIGATEWAY_ERRORS_4XX
METRICS.APIGATEWAY.APIGATEWAY_ERRORS_5XX

Why do I see this?

One of your API’s endpoints has a high error rate.

What does this mean?

Some errors are inevitable and should be handled from the application side. However, if error rates increase significantly, it is cause for concern and requires further investigation.

To better understand your API activity, we recommend enabling detailed CloudWatch metrics for API Gateway and at least ERROR level logging. This helps you to troubleshoot issues more effectively and respond to critical incidents in a reasonable time manner.

API Gateway high error percentage. How do I fix this?

The fix for this error depends highly on the type of error and is also implementation-specific. An HTTP status-code between 400 and 499 usually indicates a client error, but it can still point to a bug on the server. Status-codes from 500 to 599 point to backend errors, and while the client can provoke them, invalid client data should not lead to a backend error.

Some errors can even come from a wrong API Gateway configuration or a broken integration of the API with other AWS services.


For a detailed read on why this happens and how to solve it step by step, read our Debugging with Dashbird: Resolving the Most Common API Gateway Request Errors article.


This rule resolution is part of the Dashbird Serverless Well Architected Reports tool for AWS. Dashbird features a collection of rules and checks continuously applied to your infrastructure, surfacing ways to improve it.

Learn about Incident detection, optimization and best practice insights for API Gateway.

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