Using the API would have saved us a butt-ton of trouble. We built a python script to run a query against the DB and used a raspberry pi to call & display it, refreshing it every minute. When the query hit an error causing it to run for 5 minutes instead of 5 seconds, SQL server eventually overloaded and crashed, bringing the whole system down. Took forever to find the culprit, too - we thought we were being hacked etc.
So don’t be like bob