Monitoring the Unseen: Why Event-Driven APIs Break Traditional Monitoring

(An AsyncAPI Beginner’s Guide)

Most monitoring tools and mental models are built for request/response systems: you call out, you get an answer, you measure what came back. Event-driven systems — pub/sub, message queues, webhooks, Kafka, MQTT, don’t work that way. A message goes out, zero or a hundred consumers might receive it, and nothing comes back to confirm it worked. When something breaks, there’s often no error, no failed request, no alert. The system just goes quiet. In this talk, I’ll break down exactly where event-driven architectures create blind spots for monitoring: consumer lag, message delivery guarantees, and schema drift between producers and consumers, where a “successful” deployment can quietly break every subscriber downstream without tripping a single alert. Using real AsyncAPI specifications, I’ll walk through a producer/consumer setup, show how schema drift happens in practice, and demonstrate how AsyncAPI’s tooling can validate contracts and surface that drift before it becomes an outage, the same role OpenAPI plays for REST, applied to the part of your stack that doesn’t “respond.” Drawing on my work within the AsyncAPI Initiative, where I contribute to its specification tooling and CLI ecosystem, this talk gives monitoring and infrastructure engineers a practical lens for a part of the system that’s often invisible until it’s already broken. No prior knowledge of event-driven architecture is required.

Speaker

  • Aishat Muibudeen
    Aishat Muibudeen AsyncAPI initiative
    Aishat Muibudeen
    Aishat Muibudeen
    AsyncAPI initiative

    Aishat Muibudeen is Design Lead and Social Media Coordinator at AsyncAPI Initiative, where she sits on the Technical Steering Committee and Code of Conduct Committee, maintains three of its repositories, and contributes to the tooling ecosystem that helps developers work with event-driven API specifications. Five years into open source, with past contributions to CHAOSS and Knative, she’s spent that time at the intersection of specification design and the tooling that makes specs usable in practice. She co-founded OpenNest Africa, an initiative making open-source tech tangible for people who’ve never been told they belong in it. She’s spoken at the OpenForum Academy Symposium, AsyncAPI Lagos Conference, PyData Berlin, and PyLadies Con, and is B2 fluent in German, picked up almost entirely off-grid over the past year.

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Date

Nov 18 - 19 2026