APIs Overview

The Kentik APIs, which enable programmatic control of Kentik, are covered in the following topics:

• About Kentik APIs
• About the V6 APIs
• About the V5 APIs
• API Rate Limiting
• API Access Via cURL

Note: For assistance using a Kentik API, please contact Customer Support.

Kentik APIs enable programmatic control over Kentik setup (administrative functions) and the querying of network data stored in Kentik, as well as alerting (notification) and mitigation in response to user-defined conditions. Kentik currently has the API versions shown below.

Kentik currently supports two API versions:

• V5 APIs: A comprehensive set of REST APIs covering administrative functions, querying, and alerting. See About the V5 APIs.
• V6 APIs: An alternative set of APIs that complement and extend the capabilities of the V5 APIs. See About the V6 APIs.

The following API versions are now discontinued (endpoints are no longer available):

• V1 APIs: Original Kentik APIs, which supported both admin and querying. Discontinued as of May 8, 2017.
• V4 APIs: Kentik APIs for modeling the Data Explorer functionality of the Kentik portal to output graphs and tables. Discontinued as of May 8, 2017.

The V6 APIs, provided for both REST endpoints and gRPC RPCs, serve two main purposes:

• Provide functionality that's not covered by the V5 APIs.
• Provide a foundation for ongoing expansion of capabilities, including in some areas that are already covered by the V5 APIs (e.g. Users and Sites).

For a list of the currently available v6 APIs, check under "V6 APIS" in the Kentik APIs section of the Contents tab of the KB.

Note: The KB includes articles on each API listed on the landing page of the portal's v6 API Tester. Some of these APIs are indicated (in the corresponding article) as being Alpha or Beta versions, which are neither supported nor recommended for production use.

The V6 API tester enables you to test the V6 API by calling its methods using data from your own Kentik account. The tester is built into the Kentik portal at the following URL: https://portal.kentik.com/v4/core/api-tester.

The Kentik V5 APIs enable programmatic management of Kentik. The V5 APIs are divided into the following main categories:

• V5 Admin APIs: The Kentik V5 Admin APIs enable programmatic management of your company's Kentik settings. The interfaces support methods that write to or read from backend information, maintained by Kentik for each company, in areas such as users, devices, sites, and tags. Calls that return information do so in key:value pairs in a JSON structure within an HTTP response body. For documentation on APIs for administrative functions (users, devices, tags, etc.), start with V5 Admin APIs. For a list, see V5 Admin Methods.
• V5 Query API: The Kentik V5 Query API enables programmatic querying of your company's network data stored in Kentik. Queries can return data or visualizations in graphics files. V5 Query API is documented in V5 Query API. For a list, see V5 Query Methods.
• V5 Alerting APIs: The Kentik V5 Alerting APIs provide programmatic notification of anomalous conditions (DDoS attacks, blocked routes, etc.) on network infrastructure monitored with Kentik, and enable the initiation and management of mitigation. Methods can return data on current or baseline (historical) conditions that deviate from your specified norms. V5 Alerting APIs are documented in V5 Alerting API. For a list, see V5 Alerting Methods.

Note: The V5 APIs fully supersede all earlier API versions (see Discontinued API Versions).

In addition to testing the V5 APIs with cURL (see API Access Via cURL) you can also use our V5 API tester, which is in ioDocs. The tester is available at the following URLs (choose based on the region in which your organization is registered with Kentik):

• US V5 API tester
• EU V5 API tester

Note: The v5 Alerting API is not included on the above tester pages.

API calls (requests to API endpoints) are rate-limited to enable fair distribution of server resources to all Kentik customers. The limits are structured to permit reasonable bursts of activity and to avoid sudden brick-wall failure. When developing code that uses the APIs, please be aware of the following key points:

• Requests from the V5 Query API and the V5 Admin APIs are counted separately and have different limits.
• Rate limits are based on a rolling minute and a rolling hour, which means that each request received by the server is included in the per-minute count for 60 seconds from time of receipt, and in the per-hour count for 3600 seconds from time of receipt.
• A server response delay is applied to every request received while the per-minute count is greater than the soft limit given in the table below.
• An HTTP 429 error may be generated by every request received while either the per-minute count is greater than the hard limit or the per-hour count is greater than the hourly limit.
• If the maximum concurrent request limit is respected then the per-minute count will never exceed the hard limit (nor will the hourly limit be exceeded for non-query APIs).

The following table shows the limits for query and non-query API calls.

The Kentik V5 APIs may be accessed using cURL (https://curl.haxx.se/) to generate HTTP requests to the Kentik API server. The use of cURL with the V5 API is covered in the following topics:

• API V5 cURL Structure
• API V5 cURL Command

The structure of an HTTP request to Kentik via cURL is made up of the elements shown in the following table, which illustrates a call to the V5 User API:

Note: For organizations that are registered on Kentik's EU cluster, use api.kentik.eu in place of api.kentik.com in the API v5 URL shown above.

When assembled, the above syntax elements become a cURL command like the following example (with placeholders highlighted), which creates a new user (the backslashes break the command into multiple lines for improved readability):

curl -X POST \
-H 'X-CH-Auth-Email: user@domain.suffix' \
-H 'X-CH-Auth-API-Token: user_api_token' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
  "user": {
    "user_name": "New_Username",
    "user_full_name": "New Username",
    "user_email": "new_user@domain.suffix",
    "user_password": "newUser_password",
    "role": "Member",
    "email_service": true,
    "email_product": true
  }
}' \
https://api.kentik.com/api/v5/user | python -m json.tool

Notes:
- A user's API token may be found at the bottom of the User Information pane of the User Profile page in the Kentik portal (access via the link on the username at the right of the main navbar).
- For organizations that are registered on Kentik's EU cluster, use api.kentik.eu in place of api.kentik.com in the API v5 URL shown above.

Using a single data (-d) parameter in cURL to pass a JSON object, as shown above, makes it easy to pass field values to Kentik:

• For the Create call of each API (User, Device, etc.), the -d parameter will take the entire JSON object corresponding to that API (e.g. the user object for the User API).
• For the Update call of each API, the -d parameter will take the JSON structure corresponding to that API, but only the fields that are to be updated will be included in the structure.

Notes:
- Depending on the programmatic context, a data (-d) parameter that contains single quotes may cause a call to fail. To escape these quotes in cURL, replace single quotes with the Unicode equivalent \u0027.
- An example of the JSON object that is returned from each of the V5 APIs is illustrated in the topics covering those APIs (see V5 Admin APIs and V5 Query API).
- For a description of the portal dimensions (and underlying KDE main table columns) corresponding to the JSON name:value pairs used by the V5 APIs, see Dimensions Reference.