Cisco AppDynamics Application Principal Management Service API

Overview

Service Principals are identities, represented as code, used by created applications, services, and automation tools to access specific resources. They allow developers to write code that can securely connect to Cisco AppDynamics public REST APIs for your Cloud Tenant. These API calls use Open Authentication 2.0 (OAuth2) token-based authentication.

You first need a Client ID and Secret to generate an access token. You then use the access token for API access calls into your Cloud Tenant.

Info
It is best to create one Service Principal for each integration project.

Use Cases

As a DevOps engineer, you implement an application for creating cloud connections. The integration has been running on your system for several weeks and has created several successful connections. The company security policy requires you to rotate integration secrets every 90 days. You want to ensure that the current secret is not usable by an outside party yet still allow the integration to continue working.

You immediately access the Cloud Tenant Service Principal Details page through Account Management and rotate the secret to generate a new one. You replace the old secret in the integration with the new secret and restart the application. Since you no longer need the old secret, you want to revoke it. You go back to the Cloud Tenant Service Principal Details page and now you see that you are able to revoke the secret.

OAuth 2.0 Security

OAuth2 is the industry-standard open protocol for authorization. It is a simple and standard method to provide third-party web, mobile, and desktop applications with an access token that authorizes sharing specific account information. As part of the OAuth process, the authorization server validates the credentials and returns a signed access token. You can use the token to make requests to Tenants during the token availability time frame.

Clients authenticate with the Authorization Server in accordance with Section 4.4 of OAuth 2.0 RFC6749.