Glossary
External Dependency Intelligence
Independent knowledge about the third-party services your product depends on.
Definition
External Dependency Intelligence is the practice of continuously observing the third-party APIs and services your infrastructure depends on - from outside both your stack and the vendor’s - and turning those observations into attributable, timestamped records of behavior.
The problem
Your own monitoring tells you that your checkout is failing. It cannot tell you whether the cause is your code or the payment provider three hops away whose status page still reads “operational”.
Why it matters
Without an independent record, every vendor incident becomes an argument about whose system failed. With one, it becomes a comparison of two measured timelines.
Practical example
At 14:02 your error rate spikes. RELIASTRA’s regional probes show your payment provider’s API timing out from two regions over the same window, while your database latency is flat. The investigation starts at the vendor, not in your codebase.
How RELIASTRA approaches it
RELIASTRA checks each configured dependency on a fixed interval from independent regions, records latency, status codes and outcomes with timestamps, applies quorum rules before declaring incidents, and binds evidence reports to checksums you can verify.
Know when your dependencies fail. Prove what happened.
Monitor the external APIs your product relies on, correlate their failures with your incidents, and generate verifiable evidence when a vendor causes downtime.