Cisco Prime Infrastructure API
Prime Infrastructure API Documentation

# Things to Know about the Prime Infrastructure API

Here are a few key facts about the Prime Infrastructure API.

## The Prime Infrastructure API is organized around four major areas.

The API covers the following areas:

- Device related information, such as physical and logical details, but also credentials, alarms and events.
- Statistics related to devices, enabling assessment of the health of Devices in the network.
- Report access, where you can trigger and collect result of any report defined in the system.
- Template Configuration access, manage, and deploy configuration templates through the API.

## The API is a RESTful resource

The Prime Infrastructure API attempts to conform to the design principles of Representational State Transfer ( REST). Simply change the format extension of a request to get results in the format of your choice. The documentation notes which formats are available for each method. The API presently supports the following data formats: XML, JSON, with some methods only accepting a subset of these formats.

## There are limits to how many calls and changes you can make

Prime Infrastructure API usage is rate limited to protect Prime Infrastructure itself, and ensure fair access for all clients of the Prime Infrastructure API.

## You can control the size and order of the response

Filtering, Sorting, and paging are available for most of the REST resources. This allows control of the amount of data being returned by a request. The documentation notes which formats are available for each method.

## Prime Infrastructure API is entirely HTTP-based

In general, methods to retrieve data from Prime Infrastructure API require a GET request. Methods that submit, change, or destroy data require a POST, PUT, or DELETE. Prime Infrastructure API methods will return an error if you do not make your request with the correct request type. Check the detailed documentation to see the correct request type. HTTP Response Codes are meaningful.

## Authentication is required

All requests to Prime Infrastructure API must be authenticated. A user must be part of the admin group to access the Prime Infrastructure API.

The domains to which a user has access is managed in the the same as for normal UI access. This means that basic requests will scoped by the "default" domain that is specified in the Prime Infrastructure application. It is possible to switch to an alternative domain in a session, provided always that the user has permissions to view that new domain.

## Prime Infrastructure API is versioned

The url for the api contains a segment for the major version (currently v1). In future any changes that result in a change of behavior will result in the release of a new major version of the api. The previous behavior will be maintained for some time to permit a smooth migration path. Such changes will be advertised though product release documentation.

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