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Web API for System Center Operations Manager

05/05/201715/11/2017
by Martin Ehrnst

The SCOM web API is updated, see this post

You will always find the latest SCOM Web API release on GitHub

System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a widely used monitoring platform and one of its advatages is the ability to custom author monitoring through management pack development.
With a ‘cloud first’ approach most systems is able to do information exchange or integration through a web-based API, often reffered to as a REST API. SCOM have many ways to exchange information and the System Center Suite also have an integration platform call System Center Service Provide Foundation (SPF) which you can read more about here

To support a more light weight integration platform i decided to start my first C# project and develop a web-based API for SCOM that supported the daily used “functions”. Thanks to my colleague @RudiMartinsen i managed to create a working solution.

API Endpoints

[GET] Agents (Admin privileges required)
- Get all agents
- single based on Guid
[GET] Alerts
- Gets all alerts
- single based on Guid
- Single based on ComputerName
  - Include ‘closed’ with IncClosed=true
[PUT] Alerts
- Update a single alert with resolution state and/or ticket id
- Monitor generated alerts will be resett if 255 (closed) is sent as resolution state
[GET] WindowComputers
- Get all partial monitoring object from the Windows Computer class
- Single based on ComputerName
[POST] ComputerMaintenance*
- Maintenance mode a Windows Computer for a specific # minutes
[GET] MonintoringObject/{id}
- Get a single monitoring object based on ID (Guid)

I have uploaded the source project on GitHub and hopefully our community can continue to develop and introduce new features missing in this release.

Installation

There are two versions of the API. One without user impersonation and one where this is available. To install the version with user impersonation enabled. Do the following on a SCOM Management server

Download the project or .zip file from GitHub
Copy the required .dll from your management server (\Operations Manager\Server\SDK Binaries) to the web api Bin folder
- Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Core.dll
- Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.dll
- Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Runtime.dll
Create a new web site and set physical path to where you extracted the files

Enable windows authentication (and basic if you want)
Set your Application pool to use network service identity

Examples

Using powershell here are a few examples on how you can use the API

Get Alerts

#Get all alerts
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri 'http://localhost:64049/Api/alerts' -UseDefaultCredentials

#Get a single alert
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri 'http://localhost:64049/Api/alerts?id=4a6f29e3-f4b5-4883-a3f2-97eb3be50c12' -UseDefaultCredentials

#Get alerts specified with computername
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri 'http://localhost:64049/Api/alerts?ComputerName=COMPUTERNAME.fqdn' -UseDefaultCredentials

Put a computer in to maintenance

PS C:\Users\...> $json = @"
{
    "DisplayName": "COMPUTERNAME.fqdn",
    "Minutes": 10,
    "comment": "I believe this is working"
}
"@

Invoke-RestMethod -Method POST -Uri 'http://localhost:64049/API/ComputerMaintenance' -Body $json -UseDefaultCredentials -ContentType 'Application/json'

Returns

DisplayName           Minutes EndTime                      comment                  
-----------           ------- -------                      -------                  
COMPUTER NAME.fqdn      10 2017-05-05T08:42:56.5938294Z I believe this is working

Get a monitoring object

#Get a monitoring object
Invoke-restmethod -uri 'http://localhost:64049/API/MonitoringObject/cb191c1a-47dc-3c51-3686-9f66dd59f187' -UseDefaultCredentials


displayName : D:
healthState : Success
inMaintenance : False
stateLastModified : 23.03.2017 15.39.23
classes :
path : MyComputerHostingThisDisk.fqdn

Limitations*

SCOM .dll files will need to copied manually in to the web api application folder as I assume im not allowed to redestribute these.

Automation

First look at the vSphere 6.5 REST API

04/03/2017
by Martin Ehrnst

The other day I stumbled across a blog series by William Lee who delves deep in to how you use the latest vmware vSphere REST API using PowerCLI. Using the language I know best, Powershell I thought I should give this API I try. I have some experience with API use from before as I often use this to do information exchange between systems, but this is my first experince with vCenter.

This post will cover the very basics on how we authenticate and get a list of all VM’s connected to our vCenter server.

You can explore and test all endpoints by this URL https://vcenter/rest/apiexplorer

To get started I declare two variables for the urls / endpoints we going to use. One for vm’s and one for the session endpoint

$VCBaseUri = "https://host/rest/vcenter/vm"
$SessionUri = "https://host/rest/com/vmware/cis/session"

Based on the credential input from the user we will create a base64 encoded string and create a header for the session endpoint.

#Getting cred and creating auth key
$Cred = Get-Credential
$auth = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($Cred.UserName+':'+$Cred.GetNetworkCredential().Password))
$head = @{
  'Authorization' = "Basic $auth"
}

The $head variable now contains a table with your encoded username and password. We will use this authorization header to create a new session. At first i assumed we could authenticate using basic authentication only but after a little investigation I figured we needed to create a session. vmware has documented the endpoint here

Using our authorization header we connect to the session endpoint and recieves a token that we use in our session header. From now on. All authentication is with this session token.

the key for our token is ‘vmware-api-session-id’

#Creating a Session

$token = (Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Headers $head -Uri $SessionUri).Value
$session = @{'vmware-api-session-id' = $token}

Finally you can call the VM endpoint and retrieve all your vms by running the following.

#Calling VM endpoint authenticated with the session

$vms = (Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $VCBaseUri -Headers $session -ContentType 'Application/json').Value

To get a single vm by name, you can filter by appending the uri.

/vm?filter.names=web-w2k12"

Hopefully you will have this output showing all vm’s as objects

My complete script now looks like this.

$VCBaseUri = "https://host/rest/vcenter/vm?filter.names=argaste-web-w2k12"
$SessionUri = "https://host/rest/com/vmware/cis/session"

#Getting cred and creating auth key
$Cred = Get-Credential
$auth = [System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($Cred.UserName+':'+$Cred.GetNetworkCredential().Password))
$head = @{
  'Authorization' = "Basic $auth"
}

#Creating a Session

$token = (Invoke-RestMethod -Method Post -Headers $head -Uri $SessionUri).Value
$session = @{'vmware-api-session-id' = $token}

#Calling VM endpoint authenticated with the session

$vms = (Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $VCBaseUri -Headers $session -ContentType 'Application/json').Value