Empowering MSPs with Comprehensive API Access

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) deal with multiple vendors to provide diverse services. Most large MSPs typically make administration consistent and efficient by: 

• Integrating business applications with their management console

• Automating frequently performed and routine tasks 

• Minimizing tool context switch for administrators

This is typically achieved with the help of APIs from the business application. 

This blog describes how we empower MSPs to access a wide range of Druva APIs helping them achieve their integration goals. With this, Druva not only provides a good management console for MSPs but also a wide range of APIs to make MSP’s tasks easier.

Druva APIs

Druva provides a wide range of APIs to customers to ease their monitoring, reporting, dashboards, and management tasks. These APIs are listed at https://developer.druva.com. 

These are categories of APIs that are available. 

• Platform

• Endpoints and Data Governance

• Endpoints and Data Governance GovCloud

• Hybrid Workloads

• Hybrid Workloads GovCloud

• Cyber Resilience

• Native Workloads

• Managed Service Providers

However, most Druva APIs require customer-level authentication tokens to work. MSP customers were only initially able to access APIs listed under “Managed Service Providers.” This is because authentication tokens for MSP APIs were not valid for customer context APIs. Since MSPs work across multiple customers, typically 50 to 200 or more, accessing these APIs would have required them to manage as many tokens.

This blog describes how we enabled MSPs to access all APIs including customer context APIs. 

Solution Outline

The new solution to empower MSPs added support for issuing authentication tokens at a customer context level, allowing them to access any Druva API.

For this, we provided a “Token API” which would validate, authenticate, and provide MSP and customer authentication tokens for the requested customer. This customer authentication would be good enough until expiry (typically 30 mins) to access all Druva APIs at the customer context level. 

MSP Apps, integrations, and scripts would typically perform the following steps:

1. Authenticate as MSP using API credentials to obtain a token

   • Endpoint: https://apis.druva.com/msp/auth/v1/token

   • Documentation: https://developer.druva.com/reference/msp-authentication

2. Optional: Enumerate customers using MSP APIs to get customer ID (if not available in the app/script already) 

   • Endpoint: https://apis.druva.com/msp/v2/customers   

   • Documentation: https://developer.druva.com/reference/getcustomers

3. For each customer, fetch customer access token

   • Endpoint: https://apis.druva.com/msp/v2/customers/{customerID}/token

   • Documentation: https://developer.druva.com/reference/reference-getting-started

4. Call any Druva customer context APIs listed at https://developer.druva.com including

   • Endpoint: All Druva APIs  (e.g SIEM events or platform reporting etc.)

   • Documentation: https://developer.druva.com/reference/choose-your-druva-product

Benefits

This solution empowers MSPs by allowing them to access a wide gamut of customer context APIs easily, without any additional token management overhead. Essentially, with just single API credentials, MSPs would be able to call all Druva APIs at customer context levels. This empowers them to integrate easily with a wide range of MSP management tools like AutoTask, ServiceNow, ConnectWise, and many others.