Faster and easier integrations with Cashfree Payments’ suite of developer tools

Developers are the unsung heroes of India’s payments ecosystem, helping businesses integrate with payment aggregators and building checkout experiences that drive revenue for India’s burgeoning digital commerce industry. At Cashfree Payments, we wanted to make the lives of developers easier – not just by offering easy-to-integrate RESTful APIs and good documentation, but by offering tools that would make integration, troubleshooting, and managing payments integrations much easier.

Cashfree Payments has now released a set of Developer Tools to make it easier for developers to build an integration, track and find errors, as well as monitor the health of their integration seamlessly. To do this, we focused on a few underlying principles – 

1. Providing visibility: Developers should be able to access detailed information pertaining to every API call and webhook, and should have single-point access to determine their use of APIs and the different active integrations;
2. Information accessibility: Often, developers need to get in touch with technical teams at payment aggregators to check on API errors and logs. This should be unnecessary; developers should be able to independently track any expected and unexpected errors to make the integration and monitoring process as simple as possible; and
3. Preparing for scale: As businesses grow, the volume and number of API requests tend to increase. Developers at these businesses should be the first people to project that their API use might be getting ahead of rate limits, and should be able to request higher rate limits independently to avoid friction.

With this in mind, we have built 4 new tools that are accessible on your Payment Gateway dashboard.

1. API Logs
2. Webhooks
3. Rate Limit monitor
4. Integrations tracker

API Logs and Metrics

As there are innumerable API requests arising from a single integration at any point in time, tracking them and understanding where errors might be arising from is a significant part of keeping the payments processing smooth. Our new API Logs view in the Developer Console will enable developers to –

1. Debug any API error instantly: Get a count of the API errors and the reasons for it for any time period instantly. This will allow you to understand what went wrong and reformulate the request so it meets the expected format and gives the correct and expected results for you and for Cashfree’s system.
2. Complete API Log and error details: Beyond ad hoc troubleshooting, this view will allow you to access all API requests and responses, track the overall health of your integration, and monitor its health on an ongoing basis.
3. Alerts about API failures: This view will also enable developers to get ahead of problems, letting you know if an API call or a specific request is failing. This will help developers fix problems before they get out of control.

Webhooks

Webhooks are the backbone of many payment processes, allowing confirmation of various events in the payment process – the creation of an order, the completion of payment, the status of a payment, a settlement, or a dispute. Beyond being failsafes, they are also essential to a business’ ability to track the completion of pending payments and settlements. Our new webhooks view will:

1. Easy configuration: You can quickly and easily configure webhooks from your dashboard. You will be able to set up endpoints and track responses from this single powerful dashboard with ease.
2. Logs and Error details: Webhooks not working as expected? See the error code, meaning and cause, as well as the time for a webhook error to analyze the cause of failure and fix webhooks for your system.
3. View all webhook attempts: This handy log will help you understand when a webhook was initiated and what the response was, enabling easier debugging and fixing of webhook-related issues.

Rate Limits

API rate limits restrict businesses from driving too many requests to the central system of a payment aggregator. At Cashfree Payments, our tech stack is robust enough to handle a very high volume of requests, but this is shared with different businesses based on the expected number of requests they will generate. When businesses scale and the number of requests grow, businesses should be able to track the current API requests, monitor their usage, and request higher rate limits. The Rate Limits view enables developers to:

1. View current rate limits: Track the current rate limit placed upon your existing Cashfree Payments account directly from the dashboard;
2. Monitor usage: Get visibility on the extent of your current usage of the Rate Limits across different points of time – last 4 hours, average usage across 24 hours, etc. to see if you are getting close to your total allocated limit; and
3. Request for higher limit: If the number of requests is coming close to your rate limit, you can request a higher limit by writing to care@cashfree.com.

Integration usage

Today’s digital businesses are omnichannel, often transacting across various touchpoints with their customers – via websites, applications, and social media, for example. Tracking your various integrations, knowing when new integrations are going live, and when old integrations are getting deprecated is essential for a developer. Our new Integration Usage view will:

1. Enable easier monitoring: Track active and inactive integrations from one place, as well as their usage;
2. Track migration requirements: Note which integrations are supported, which ones aren’t, and which ones need to be migrated; and
3. New integration launches: Get alerted when a new integration version is introduced so you can start the integration process as soon as possible.

As part of our journey to empower Indian businesses and their developers, this set of tools is our step towards making payments and integrations more seamless. We hope you find these tools useful in integrating with Cashfree Payments, and have a fruitful growth journey with Cashfree Payments.