API Limits for Sandbox

[Richard_Thelwel]

Hi team, 

We're currently coming up against issues where our internal engineering team are sporadically using large volumes of API calls on our main Marketo account (our own product has a Marketo connector and they do occasional testing through an API user). 

We recently spun up a Sandbox environment in addition to our Prod instance of Marketo. Our account has an API limit of 50,000 calls per day but I'm wondering if this is shared across both our main instance and the new sandbox, or whether the sandbox has its own separate limit, and therefore moving the API user across to the sandbox only could fix our issues?

I can't seem to find any documentation on API limits in relation to Sandbox environments so hoping someone knows more.

Alternatively, has anyone done anything clever on the Marketo end to restrict the number of API calls that a particular API user can make?

Thanks!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

They’re completely separate — separate Munchkin IDs and possibly geographic regions.

You can’t do per-user rate limits within the platform itself, which is why I recommend that everyone use an API gateway in front of Marketo. Of course this means 3rd-party apps can’t make assumptions about REST URLs and have to allow the base to be set manually (i.e. not munchkinid.mktorest.com but munchkinid.marketo.example.com).

[Richard_Thelwel]

Thanks Sanford, that's very helfpul! We'll look into 3rd party options. 

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

The # of API calls are not shared between the instances. Both the instances (sandbox and prod) have their own API endpoints, API quota, users and roles section, and launch point service management, etc. You should see available API calls in the Marketo Admin > Integration > Web Services section for each instance. Also, you cannot move users just like that from one instance to another, you'd need to create a separate user (API or otherwise) and a launchpoint service (only in the case of an API user).

With regards to your question about monitoring limits, Marketo has REST API endpoints that could be used to monitor the daily or last 7 days of API usage. Also, these endpoints return the net usage at the instance level and not at the user level for you to enforce limits on the number of calls at the user level. You could, however, start throttling calls for services that are not time sensitive when you're nearing the day's limits until the limits are restored the next day.

[Richard_Thelwel]

Super useful - thank you for the info!