Introduction

NetMRI collects, organizes, and displays information in an array of customizable tables, graphs, and reports covering virtually every aspect of network operations. NetMRI search functions can be used to find and filter stored information. Many of NetMRI’s information and results displays can be exported as CSV files, Excel spreadsheets, and PDF documents. Before developing a program to extract data from the NetMRI database using the API, determine whether it would be easier to obtain the needed information through the NetMRI GUI.

The NetMRI Application Programming Interface (API) enables external programs to retrieve information about devices, interfaces, VLANs, and other network entities from the NetMRI database, and to retrieve information about neighbor relationships between devices, and send commands to NetMRI.

The API is intended for use by customers wanting to leverage or reformat information from the NetMRI database for use in other systems and applications. Typical applications include:

• Custom External programs can extract data from NetMRI to populate portions of dashboards and displays that integrate data from multiple systems. Such applications may consolidate status, trends, and urgent issues in operations centers or management displays.
• Custom External programs may transfer NetMRI data to third-party reporting systems to create reports with specialized content and with standard formatting. These reports may combine data from multiple systems.
• Configuration Management Database will leverage NetMRI as the trusted source for network device asset inventory, properties, topology, configuration, and health.
• Asset management Some organizations have separate asset management systems and can obtain asset information from NetMRI, similar to CMDB projects.

Primary changes in the current API consist of updates to existing models, objects, and methods to include the necessary relationships with newly added nested device group objects.