Management Page
In 2020.2.1, you can now find a simple management page for API pollers. Navigate to 'Settings' -> 'All Settings' -> 'Manage API Pollers' and you will be able to view all of your API pollers in once place. On this page you can also add, delete, edit, copy, and even import and export API pollers.
Settings -> All Settings -> Manage API Pollers
String Monitoring
APIs sometimes return strings, instead of numerical values. An example of this would be an API that has a 'Status' field that reports values such as 'Operational' 'Degraded' etc. Starting with 2020.2.1, the API poller in SAM can now monitor these string values.
When monitoring a string value using the API poller, you can automatically assign an integer to the expected string value, and then set alerts based on that value and even add it to a chart in Perfstack to indicate up or down.
Monitoring string values
Chaining Requests
You now have the ability to chain API requests together, using values returned in one request, as parameters or variables in subsequent requests. This is useful for two reasons.
Saving a value as a variable for subsequent requests
1) Temporary tokens for authentication
Some APIs require you to first authenticate using a username and password to retrieve a temporary token, and then the token is used in subsequent requests to actually pull data from the API. With chaining requests, it's now possible to monitor APIs like these by chaining two requests together, the first request storing the returned token as a variable, and the second request using the stored variable.
2) Discovery APIs
Many APIs are designed with discovery endpoints, these are endpoints that list available information such as a list of users, or a list of network interfaces. These are designed in a way that you can list information in one request, find the item you are looking for, and make a second request to get detailed information about that one item. You can now use the API poller to monitor these types of APIs by making an initial request to identify a user ID, or interface name, and then make another request using that identifier to gather detailed information.
Your Feedback Counts!
We're incredibly interested in your feedback! Your feedback shapes our products. Post your thoughts, questions and concerns into the SAM forum and the SAM team will be watching for input to make the product better and better. In addition, if you come up with a brand new feature idea that we should consider for a future version, the best place to capture those ideas would be SAM Feature Requests and as you can see from our What We’re Working on for SAM page, we take those inputs very seriously.