Flexera One API quick start

[ChrisG]

The Flexera One API and Flexera One IT Asset Management API provide a way for scripts and other automation technologies to programmatically access data held in Flexera One.

In this post I give a some quick start examples using shell (bash) and curl commands to illustrate basic use of these APIs.

Generating a refresh token

Before calling any API endpoints, you must generate a long-lived refresh token associated with your user account. This is a once-off operation.

To do this:

1. Log in to Flexera One.
2. Click the profile icon in the top right corner of the page and then select User Settings.
3. On the left menu, click API Credentials and then click the CREATE API REFRESH TOKEN button

See the following page for more details about this process: Generating a Refresh Token.

NOTE 1: Don't forget to save your refresh token securely! Once the token has been generated and displayed, you cannot retrieve it again; you can only generate a new token.

NOTE 2: This quick start post illustrates the use of user authentication for calling API endpoints. Service account authentication can also be used. See the following page for details about this: Authentication.

Shell environment setup

Example commands in the following sections of this page use a couple of shell variables that contain details about your Flexera One environment. These variables can be initialized as follows:

fOneEndpoint=flexera.com # or flexera.eu or flexera.au

orgId=12345 # Your Flexera One org ID

Some of the examples also use the jq command-line tool to process JSON data returned by APIs. Package repositories for most modern operating systems contain a package to easily install jq.

Generating an access token from a refresh token

Once you have a refresh token, it can be used to generate a short-lived access token that can subsequently be used to authenticate when calling API endpoints.

The following commands illustrate how to generate an access token by POSTing to the /oidc/token endpoint:

# Securely prompt for the refresh token
refreshToken=$(read -sp "Refresh token: " && echo $REPLY)

accessToken=`curl -s -X POST https://login.$fOneEndpoint/oidc/token -d "grant_type=refresh_token&refresh_token=$refreshToken" | jq -r .access_token`

NOTE: Access tokens expire after 1 hour. The /oidc/token endpoint can be called again to generate a new access token as needed.

See the following page for more information: Generating an Access Token From Refresh Token.

Example calls to API endpoints

With an access token in hand, you are now ready to call API endpoints. The following examples illustrate calling some endpoints.

NOTE: The actual API endpoints you can call and the data returned will be governed by what Flexera One products & capabilities are covered by your organization's Flexera One subscription, and what rights are assigned to your Flexera One user account.

Sample JSON output shown below  is formatted for readability. The actual output returned when calling API endpoints generally does omits unnecessary whitespace.

Retrieving data from a Flexera One ITAM custom report

The reportsIndex API endpoint can be used to retrieve details about custom reports that have been configured in Flexera One ITAM. This is useful for looking up the numeric ID of a report by name.

For example, to retrieves the ID of a report with the name "Inventory device details":

reportId=$(
  curl https://api.$fOneEndpoint/fnms/v1/orgs/$orgId/reports -H "Authorization: Bearer $accessToken" |

  jq -r '.[] | select(.title=="Inventory device details") | .id'
)

The retrieved ID of the report can be used with the reportsExecute API endpoint to run the report and return data:

curl https://api.$fOneEndpoint/fnms/v1/orgs/$orgId/reports/$reportId/execute -H "Authorization: Bearer $accessToken"

Sample output:

{
  "values": [
    {
      "ComputerID": 12,
      "ComputerName": "vm40949",
      "ComputerType": "Virtual Machine",
      "OperatingSystem": "HP-UX 11.31",
      "SerialNo": "384b572c-4e0a-12de-f5ce-67f6739d6c23"
    },
    {
      "ComputerID": 13,
      "ComputerName": "esx9523",
      "ComputerType": "VM Host",
      "OperatingSystem": null,
      "SerialNo": "784b572d-72da-93de-c5fe-89f63b9d6723"
    },
    [...]
  ],
  "nextPage": "/fnms/v1/orgs/12345/reports/207/execute?skipToken=CAEaBTEwMDAd83JduriRjZjAwZTY0OC00MzJjLTQ1ZjAtOTdmMC0xNWFkM2ZiODFiZjc%3D"
}

Report data is returned in pages. Use the nextPage value in the returned result to retrieve the next page of data.

For further exploration about how to retrieve Flexera One ITAM custom report data, see the following article that provides a sample PowerShell script that uses these API endpoints: The New Generic ITAM REST API for querying any web report is available! A PowerShell example.

Querying Technopedia data

Technopedia data can be queried through a GraphQL API.

Here is an example:

echo '
{
  "query": "
    query softwareProduct($name: [String]) {
        SoftwareProduct(name: $name) {
            name
            id
            manufacturer { name }
            softwareReleases { id softwareLifecycle { endOfLifeDate } softwareVersion { name } }
        } 
    }
  ",
  "variables": {"name": ["Maximo", "SQL Server"]}
}
' |
tr '\n' ' ' |
curl https://api.$fOneEndpoint/content/v2/orgs/$orgId/graphql -H "Authorization: Bearer $accessToken" --data @-

The sample GraphQL query shown here includes line breaks for ease of reading. The tr command is used to remove these line breaks, as line breaks are not allowed in the query text.

Sample output:

{
  "data": {
    "SoftwareProduct": [
      {
        "id": "12e307a6-b43f-4eec-a1df-f6a42134b3c9",
        "manufacturer": {
          "name": "IBM"
        },
        "name": "Maximo",
        "softwareReleases": [
          {
            "id": "08bdb8ce-1d80-4c9b-8c2b-488e2637398b",
            "softwareLifecycle": {
              "endOfLifeDate": "2999-12-31T00:00:00Z"
            },
            "softwareVersion": {
              "name": "SaaS (7.6)"
            }
          },
          {
            "id": "4069046f-0f87-4e9c-a533-587dcd0cae00",
            "softwareLifecycle": {
              "endOfLifeDate": "2022-12-30T00:00:00Z"
            },
            "softwareVersion": {
              "name": "8.0"
            }
          },
          [...]
        ]
      },
      [...]
    ]
  }
}

See the following page for details about the various datasets that can be queried from Technopedia: Datasets.

What's next?

The above examples illustrate basic API usage. Some aspects to consider for more comprehensive usage are:

• The examples given here do not illustrate checking for errors or unexpected conditions that would be appropriate to perform in any real-world automation.
• Large data sets returned from API endpoints may be paged - multiple calls to the API may be required to retrieve complete data sets.
• An access tokens may time out and need to be refreshed if there is some time between when the access token is generated and an API call is made.

We would love to hear what you are doing with the Flexera One APIs! Please add comments on this post to share and inspire us.

However if you have a question about this post or using the Flexera One APIs in general, it will be helpful to avoid comment-confusion if you can please create a new thread in the Flexera One forum and refer back to this post rather than adding a comment here.