Get started with APEX AIOps Incident Management APIs

An endpoint is a resource in an application that is able to interact with another software program in specific ways. It is capable of receiving a request and responding to it. An example of this in Incident Management is sending a cURL request (covered below) to an endpoint to download collector software to set up on your computer.

Some other examples of Incident Management endpoints include:

Endpoints can receive information in a request to update data on the system, or respond by sending information to the requester.

A parameter, in API terms, is a piece of information passed to an API endpoint to somehow modify the endpoint response. This information could be optional, or it could be required. When requesting a collector installation by API, for example, the request must include a string parameter which indicates the OS version (platform) of the collector setup to send. Other examples of parameters for different endpoints include filters, user IDs, alert IDs, and integration names.

Swagger was originally a way of representing an API using JSON, built upon a REST API architecture, which provided a way to try out APIs and develop against them. Swagger later was renamed as OpenAPI Specification (OAS).

Swagger is now a set of open source development tools for producing REST-based APIs that adhere to the OpenAPI Specification. These tools includes applications for designing APIs (Swagger Editor), building APIs (Swagger Codegen), and documentation (Swagger UI).

For more details, visit swagger.io.

YAML is a programming language used for creating configuration files. It either stands for "Yet Another Markup Language" or "YAML Ain't a Markup Language," depending on your preference. YAML is popular for use in Ansible, and for Kubernetes resources and deployments.

For the purposes of Incident Management APIs, YAML files are produced as a part of the software development process and are used for documentation purposes. The Incident Management API documentation is built from auto-generated YAML files.

The term cURL stands for "client URL" and it is a way to deliver data to and from a server. It supports HTTP and HTTPS, though you will always use HTTPS with Incident Management cURL commands to APIs.

Sending cURL requests to an API requires no additional setup for systems like MacOS and Linux, which have built-in shells. If you have a Microsoft-based system, you can install or enable a bash shell, depending on your OS version. Refer to the documentation from Microsoft, or search for third-party shell programs you can install on Microsoft platforms.

To check if cURL requests are working on your system, you can send a test event that will create an alert in Incident Management.

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After you have tested API functionality on your system, you are ready to move on to using the APIs to perform meaningful tasks. The Incident Management API documentation includes the ability to interactively build API requests which can save time when customizing requests.

Use the following instructions to build a simple request to send to the Alerts service. It retrieves information about an alert in Incident Management. You can use the alert you created in the test procedure if you need to do so.

Note that you can also copy the code from the Response Example section and modify it as needed, then send to an endpoint using a shell or Postman. To use a different language, select a new language from the Request Sample menu. The Request box updates with the same command in your selected language.