Track API Usage In Your Python Script — Not Your Credit Card Bill

If You Thought Sharing Netflix Was Bad… Wait Until You Share API Tokens

As a remote employee who does a lot of asynchronous work, I often find myself with unscheduled breaks throughout my work day. One of the most fulfilling type of break is “stepping away” to go walk or engage with the two-legged and four-legged members of my household.

The least fulfilling break? When I’ve hit, exceeded or otherwise exhausted API tokens and get the dreaded “Wait for token to refresh” response. Although sometimes they’re even vaguer: “Try again in some time.”

Either way, bumping up against both organizational and account-level API limits is a problem that often gets treated as a black box. Sometimes in the requirements gathering stage I hear that we have x hundred thousand requests a month. It sounds like a lot at first, until you think of who all shares account access. At some points API access becomes like sharing a Netflix login–accounts keep getting added and usage and, consequently, costs, increase.

When working on my perpetually in-progress side project that syncs an API with a scheduled Looker Studio dashboard, I attempted something new.

I wanted to pry open the black box and add some monitoring to my next pipeline.

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