Gather Your Data Insights with Druva REST APIs

Druva believes that its customers can and should be able to do more with their backup data. Conversations with our customers reflect this belief and give credence to a growing demand for value-add services that can leverage backup data across endpoints, data centers, and cloud workloads to address use cases such as reporting, ransomware recovery, security, IT automation, forensics, and eDiscovery.

To meet our customer demands, Druva is enabling integration with third-party service providers via REST APIs to allow our customers to link their data and gather insights from the Druva Cloud Platform. Let’s dive further into REST APIs and how they are allowing Druva customers to get the most from their backup data.

What are REST APIs?

REST APIs advertise extensive product functionalities that can be leveraged for automation and reporting workflows either via third-party integrations or via standalone REST API calls. Users can download the API specification (OpenAPI) for a Druva product and consume it offline. Druva supports the export of API specification to OAS 3.0, which defines a standard, language-agnostic interface to RESTful APIs.

Staying true to its SaaS model, Druva ensures that users don’t need to maintain any infrastructure to access these APIs. REST APIs are authenticated using OAuth 2.0 access token, which is the most secure and popular authentication mechanism for APIs, and is used by most enterprises.

Use cases for Druva REST APIs

While there are multiple use cases revolving around REST APIs and how they enable customers to gather insights from their backup data in the Druva Cloud Platform, let’s visit a couple of the more common use cases.

Reporting

You can use any third-party business intelligence (BI) tools to integrate with our reporting APIs to receive reports based on your needs. You can further slice and dice this data to receive data usage trends, backup and restore job statuses, and SLA-related reports. These reports provide insight into the consumption of services and help optimize costs and risks.

In addition, these reports provide an overview of your backup infrastructure and assist you in providing actionable insights. Thus, enabling you to customize and obtain reports that display data based on your business needs.

For example, you can create a report that can display all of your VM backups along with other details and the latest backup status for the last 24 hours. If required, you can filter the report to view only the failed backup jobs with their respective error codes and error messages. The IT team can use these report details to take the necessary actions.

To do this, you would make an API call to query VMware backup jobs with the organization ID (a logical name created by a customer to organize backups) as a path parameter.

https://apis.druva.com/phoenix/vmware/v1/orgs/<orgID>/reports/jobs/backups

Plus, you can add more query parameters like ‘time range’ to get backup jobs for the time period you have specified in your query to receive a report like the one shown below:

IT helpdesk monitoring

REST APIs allow our customers to integrate with any IT Server Management (ITSM) and/or IT ticket management system, and provide them with an automated and centralized ticketing system that allows our customers to receive notifications about failed backup incidents across Druva Phoenix workloads — without logging into the Druva Phoenix Management Console or waiting for a notification email.

This automated process eliminates the manual efforts needed to monitor and track backup status, and accelerates action against failed backup incidents. Additionally, it provides you with the required operational ease for incident tracking and management. With the help of our APIs, you can increase agility and simplify operations. You can use the ‘Jobs API’ feature to ingest the data into your ITSM CMDB (configuration database management) and to automate the ticket creation process. Below are some sample reporting of API endpoints that list all of the jobs for specific workloads.

https://apis.druva.com/phoenix/fileserver/v1/orgs/orgID/reports/jobs

https://apis.druva.com/phoenix/sqlserver/v1/orgs/orgID/reports/jobs

https://apis.druva.com/phoenix/nas/v1/orgs/orgID/reports/jobs

We also have a Druva-ServiceNow app which further simplifies the integration and facilitates an automated ticketing system that notifies you about backup failures.

With a few simple steps, you can configure the Druva-ServiceNow app:

1. Generate API credentials on the Druva Cloud Platform.
2. Install the certified Druva app on the ServiceNow dashboard and authenticate the app with credentials provided in step 1.
3. Configure Druva App with scan intervals for failed backups and the number of failed attempts to open a ticket.
4. Fill in the details for Default Incidents Fields tab like user, assignment group, and severity along with mapping failed backup incidents from Druva Phoenix to the Servicenow field.

You find more details on our ServiceNow App here.

Next steps

REST APIs can extend and enhance your systems’ capabilities in a variety of ways and using them effectively can save you time, money, and resources. I encourage you to develop new ideas on how to use Druva REST APIs to integrate with your applications to better address your challenges and make data management much easier.

You can find more details and information on our APIs from our Developer Portal. The portal allows you to visualize and interact with API resources without having any of the implementation logic in place. You can run any API endpoint as a standalone REST API call from within the developer portal to view the response structure or receive one-time output for your backup resources. Adding to it, visual documentation on the portal makes it easy for implementation and consumption. Finally, you can find sample code on our GitHub repository.