CI Activity Stream defect

[Will Darley]

Hello, we are attempting to integrate service alerts from SolarWinds into Hornbill and have come across a strange error with the activity streams against a CI.

Seemingly the Activity Stream for a Configuration Item doesn't exist until you open that CI record in the Hornbill front end. This is the case regardless of whether the "In Policy" flag was added through the front end, through the asset import, or via the API.

Hornbill support advised that this is because we would most likely be required to use a further API request.
 

One of our specialists analysed the network traffic while opening a CI which didn't have an activity stream and could see that an API call is made to the activityStreamRegister method.

The response to this API call includes an activity stream ID, which suggests this is the undocumented API that was hinted at.

Before making use of this API, as it is undocumented, we just wanted to check that it is

a) acceptable and can be used without breaching our TOU
b) supported
c) subject to versioning, so won't suddenly stop working if your API is updated

 

Can anyone advise on this one? Many thanks
 

[Steve Giller]

I'll defer to the Developers if they have better information, but my understanding is, in very basic terms:

a) Yes.
b) No.
c) No.

All 3 are "Yes" for public APIs that we have documented but anything not documented is effectively "use at your own risk" and not something we would recommend or assist with.

See the post below for an in depth explanation.

 

 

[Gerry]

@Will Darley

Thanks for your question.  Its quite common it would seem for customers who are handy with development tools like CDT to observe the API calls and realise there are many undocumented API calls. So called undocumented, they are flagged this way for a number of reasons: -

* They are subject to change at any time, without notice to any customer. We evolve and develop our solution and API's are one of the biggest things we have to change.  So if its undocumented, this is another way of saying its not considered customer-facing, and is subject to change by us, at any time, for any reason.
* Our API infrastructure is evolving, it used to be that all API's were all served by the same front end API services/routers but this is changing, specifically, we are moving to model where customer-facing APIs (those documented) will ultimately be served by different front end servers than the API's that your browser will use, these endpoints will be self-restricting inasmuch as the API's that will work from a browser with an interactive session will no longer work with API keys, and visa versa, that means, as well as undocumented API's being subject to change, from a customer use point of view, they will likely seem to disappear altogether.

You are not in breach of our terms of use, and even if you were, in practice we are not the sort of organisation to penalise you for doing it, unless you fall foul of our "fair and reasonable use" policy, but, if you do choose to to that, then you can (and should) expect that to break in the future, and you will have no recourse with us in terms of making it work again. 

What I would encourage you to do is to describe the problem you are having, and our engineering team can have a look and see if thats something we can either resolve, or even provide a specific API for.. I am not saying we prioritise these requests, but we do want our customers to get the most value out of hornbill they can.  We are not in the business of trying to make things difficult, we simply want to carve out some space for us to be able to evolve our product, and one of the big changes we made in 2023 was around API's to help us do that.  

Hope that all makes sense. 
Gerry

[Will Darley]

Hi Gerry and Steve,

Thank you very much for your response. I did log this with Hornbill support but was referred here for further advice as using third party tooling/scripting is not covered under our support plan.

I will relay this information back over to our developer and see how they would like to proceed. I will come back to you on this thread if needed. Thank you!

[Gerry]

@Will Darley

Quote

I did log this with Hornbill support but was referred here for further advice as using third party tooling/scripting is not covered under our support plan

Yes, unfortunately we do not have an SLA'ed support service for developer support, our support team are not geared up for that kind of support, so we advise all and any developer-related questions get posted on our community where our internal dev teams will likely respond to questions.  Its a bit hit and miss sometimes because the nature of the questions can be quite complicated to understand.  We are working towards a more citizen-developer-centric solution which we are likely to also introduce some form of commercial developer/platform/API technical support for customers that need it. 

Gerry