What is Intello
Intello is an integration intelligence product for teams that depend on third-party HTTP APIs. It continuously monitors OpenAPI (Swagger) specifications, records normalized snapshots over time, diffs each revision against the previous one, and turns material differences into classified change events with optional Slack, Teams, email, and PagerDuty notifications.
You use Intello in the browser: Dependencies, the dashboard, changes, settings, and billing are all in the web app. An HTTP API exists for automation, but it is optional—see Developers (HTTP API).
This page orients you to what Intello does, who it is for, and what it does not try to replace.
When to use Intello
Use Intello when:
- You integrate with vendor or partner APIs whose schemas and endpoints evolve outside your release cycle.
- You need a shared, historical record of how those APIs changed—not just a one-off diff.
- You want routing and prioritization (severity, breaking flags, domain impact) so on-call and product teams see signal over noise.
- You operate many integrations and need consistent monitoring without bespoke scripts per vendor.
What Intello is not
- Not a replacement for integration tests. Tests prove your code against your assumptions; Intello tells you when the vendor’s contract moved. The two complement each other.
- Not an API gateway or traffic proxy. Intello does not sit in the request path; it works from published specs (and optional library-maintained defaults).
- Not a full observability stack. It does not ingest application traces or metrics. It focuses on contract-level change detection.
How this differs from contract testing alone
Consumer-driven contract tests (e.g., Pact) excel at your services and your consumers. Intello adds:
- Vendor-side drift detection when you do not control the provider’s release process.
- A durable snapshot history and diff lineage across the whole org.
- Operational workflows: per-dependency alert policies, acknowledgements, and dashboard views aligned to how platform teams triage integration risk.
Core vocabulary (preview)
You will see these terms throughout the docs:
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Organization | Your tenant. All monitored data is scoped to an org. |
| Dependency | A monitored integration: a name, spec source (usually an OpenAPI URL), sync cadence, and health state. |
| Snapshot | A normalized representation of a spec at a point in time after a successful sync. |
| Change event | One logical change derived from comparing two snapshots (e.g., response schema change on GET /users/{id}). |
| Provider / subscription | Catalog-backed specs your org follows without hosting the URL yourself. |
Deep dives: How Intello works, Dependencies vs providers.