The Orbis Cascade Alliance has a daily API call threshold of 5,984,000 for all member institutions combined. This includes both Alma and Primo API calls.
Tracking Usage
Each Developer Network account shows a daily threshold of 100,000 under Reports, but this is not a hard daily cap. The Reports can be useful for tracking your institution’s usage at a glance, but do not include usage by other Alliance institutions. If you have concerns about running a specific script that might trigger the Alliance-wide threshold, contact the Systems Program Manager.
To analyze your API usage, you can also create an Alma Analytics report in the subject area “API Usage.” For example, below is a screenshot of an analysis that shows total API calls for the past 30 days, using the advanced SQL filter: "API Dates"."Execution Date" >= (TIMESTAMPADD(SQL_TSI_DAY, -30, CURRENT_DATE))
See Ex Libris’s documentation on API Usage for definitions of fields and measures.
Reducing Usage
If your institution consistently runs tens of thousands of API calls per day, you could investigate the possibility of reducing the number of calls with these methods.
Cache Results
If your API calls are “GET” requests for information, you can try saving that information at appropriate intervals on a local server, rather than querying Ex Libris’s servers every time you need it.
For example, website widgets that display your library’s open hours or a carousel of new books probably need to be refreshed only once per day. A script could save the HTML of those widgets in a file, and a cron job or scheduled Windows task could run that script every day at midnight.
Create Webhooks
Webhooks notify scripts when specific events take place in Alma, like a physical item is checked out or returned. If your script uses repeated GET calls to check for changes in a loan or job status, patron record, or bibliographic or item record, you could utilize a webhook instead.
See these Ex Libris resources for more information and examples: