The latest API information is found by logging in to Cloud Insights and navigating to Admin > API Acccess. Click the API Documentation link.

The API Documentation is Swagger-based, which provides a brief description and usage information for the API, and allows you to try it out in your environment. Depending on your user role and/or Cloud Insights edition, the API types available to you may vary.

Before using the Cloud Insights API, you must create one or more API Access Tokens. Access tokens are used for specified API types, and can grant read and/or write permissions. You can also set the expiration for each access token. All APIs under the specified types are valid for the access token. Each token is void of a username or password.

To create an Access Token:

You can disable, enable, and revoke tokens. Tokens that are disabled can be enabled.

Tokens grant general purpose access to APIs from a customer perspective; managing access to APIs in the scope of their own tenant. Customer administrators may grant and revoke these tokens without direct involvement from Cloud Insights back end personnel.

The application receives an Access Token after a user successfully authenticates and authorizes access, then passes the Access Token as a credential when it calls the target API. The passed token informs the API that the bearer of the token has been authorized to access the API and perform specific actions specified by the scope that was granted during authorization.

The HTTP header where the Access Token is passed is X-CloudInsights-ApiKey:.

For example, use the following to retrieve storages assets:

Where <API_Access_Token> is the token you saved during API access creation.

See the swagger pages for examples specific to the API you wish to use.

The Cloud Insights API is category-based, and currently contains the following types:

Additional types and/or APIs may become available over time. You can find the latest API information in the API Swagger documentation.

Note that the API types to which a user has access depend also on the User Role they have in each Cloud Insights feature set (Monitoring, Workload Security, Reporting).

This section describes how to traverse a hierarchy of Cloud Insights objects.

Many API commands support the expand parameter, which provides additional details about the object or URLs for related objects.

The one common expand parameter is expands. The response contains a list of all available specific expands for the object.

For example, when you request the following:

The API returns all available expands for the object as follows:

Each expand contains data, a URL, or both. The expand parameter supports multiple and nested attributes, for example:

Expand allows you to bring in a lot of related data in one response. NetApp advises that you do not request too much information at one time; this can cause performance degradation.

To discourage this, requests for top-level collections cannot be expanded. For example, you cannot request expand data for all storage objects at once. Clients are required to retrieve the list of objects and then choose specific objects to expand.

Performance data is gathered across many devices as separate samples. Every hour (the default), Cloud Insights aggregates and summarizes performance samples.

The API allows access to both the samples and the summarized data. For an object with performance data, a performance summary is available as expand=performance. Performance history time series are available through nested expand=performance.history.

Examples of Performance Data objects include:

A Performance Metric has a description and type and contains a collection of performance summaries. For example, Latency, Traffic, and Rate.

A Performance Summary has a description, unit, sample start time, sample end time, and a collection of summarized values (current, min, max, avg, etc.) calculated from a single performance counter over a time range (1 hour, 24 hours, 3 days, and so on).

The resulting Performance Data dictionary has the following keys:

Each performance data object type has a unique set of performance metrics. For example, the Virtual Machine performance object supports “diskThroughput” as a performance metric. Each supported performance metric is of a certain “performanceCategory” presented in the metric dictionary. Cloud Insights supports several performance metric type listed later in this document. Each performance metric dictionary will also have the “description” field that is a human-readable description of this performance metric and a set of performance summary counter entries.

The Performance Summary counter is the summarization of performance counters. It presents typical aggregated values like min, max, and avg for a counter and also the latest observed value, time range for summarized data, unit type for counter and thresholds for data. Only thresholds are optional; the rest of attributes are mandatory.

Performance summaries are available for these types of counters:

The API can return detailed metrics for objects in your environment, for example:

See the API Swagger documentation for information on metrics for each object type.

History data is presented in performance data as a list of timestamp and counter maps pairs.

History counters are named based on the performance metric object name. For example, the virtual machine performance object supports “diskThroughput” so the history map will contain keys named “diskThroughput.read”, “diskThroughput.write” and “diskThroughput.total”.

The following is an example of a performance data JSON for a disk:

Objects with capacity attributes use basic data types and the CapacityItem for representation.

The search API is a simple entry point to the system. The only input parameter to the API is a free-form string and the resulting JSON contains a categorized list of results. Types are different asset types from the Inventory, such as storages, hosts, dataStores, and so on. Each type would contain a list of objects of the type that match the search criteria.

Cloud Insights is an extensible (wide open) solution that allows integrations with third party orchestration, business management, change control and ticketing systems as well as custom CMDB integrations.

Cloud Insight’s RESTful API is a primary point of integration that allows simple and effective movement of data as well as allows users to gain seamless access to their data.

To temporarily disable an API token, on the API token list page, click the "three dots" menu for the API, and select Disable. You can Re-enable the token at any time using the same menu and selecting Enable.

To permanently remove an API token, from the menu, select "Revoke". You cannot re-enable a revoked token; you must create a new token.

API access tokens have an expiration date. When an API access token expires, users need to generate a new token (of type Data Ingestion with Read/Write permissions) and reconfigure Telegraf to use the newly-generated token instead of the expired token. The steps below detail how to do this.