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How to use python to make REST API calls into Orion SAM?

I'm building connector software (python) between many apps we use in our NOC. Final app will be a MPOG. Building all of this in Django. We have many Orion aps in the suite but I will be connecting to SAM 2023.4.1 to retrieve alerts and events and update the NOC MPOG. A lot of confusing info out there. Other apps I connect to have not been an issue. Orion is very confusing. One person says this, another says that and so on. Not interested in building custom API poller's, just plain old REST API calls using python request etc etc...Hell I cannot even find out how to set up SAM to get an API Key. BTW we do use Microsoft AD for access to Orion. We also use AD in our other apps but I still set up the API key / account locally to the apps. I cannot even find the menu / location within the Orion SAM app to do this. From what I understand because our version is no longer limited to Bearer tokens and actually can use an API Key. So as u can see very confused here. Even the orionsdk-python GitHub has been of little help. Any clarity on this issue would be of great help.

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jm_sysadmin

My understanding is that REST calls only support Basic authorization, so you likely need an Orion/HCO or domain account to access it.
SAM can use bearer token to pull data, but I don't think there is a way to pull data from the platform like that.

Take a look in SWQL studio from the Orion SDK and the connection types listed used there, there's no token or oAuth.

mesverrum

It's fairly well documented here https://github.com/solarwinds/OrionSDK/wiki/REST

The Orion API is an extremely unusual beast, you basically have to throw away anything you are accustomed to about how other tools API's work.

Most API's are going to be something like Create Token > Rest query against a defined endpoint like /orion/ListNodes > It returns a consistently defined json output. If you want to ask it for something different you send a request to a different target.

That's not how its going to be with Orion.

You'll be using basic auth with one of the accounts in your Orion environment, and for read operations there is really only one endpoint, /SolarWinds/InformationService/v3/Json/Query , and you have to pass in a "query" which could be basically anything you can come up with in the proprietary sql-like languange. Depending on how you write your request you basically dictate the structure of the output you will get from SWIS. The easiest way to learn how to write queries is to do like @jm_sysadmin mentioned and install the SWQL Studio tool and use it to browse the available data and experiment with the query language.

And not to derail you, but why would you be building a one-off python MPOG when Grafana already exists?