Authenticating with Cisco APIs

NOTE: Cisco Meraki APIs use a different method of authentication to the standard Cisco APIs. To learn about interacting with Cisco Meraki APIs, please read the Get Hands On section of the Cisco Meraki developer website.

Subscription key

To communicate with any Cisco API through the Pivot Portal, you must include a Subscription Key in the header of every request. Otherwise your request will be blocked immediately by the Pivot Portal before relaying to Cisco. This is a security measure to protect Pivot and our partners attacks such as DDOS.

Subscription keys are only provided to trusted clients of the Pivot Cisco OEM APIs. A subscription key will be provided to you via email on request. Thereafter, using the subscription key is simple. Include the following HTTP header with every request you issued to the Pivot Portal:

Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: {subscription_key}

Token

Before you can interact with any of the Cisco OEM APIs, you must first obtain a valid access token. This access token must be included in the header of all subsequent API calls.

https://api-uat.pivotts.com/oem-cisco/cisco-identity

Post your client_id and client_secret to this URL.

Note that different categories of Cisco APIs have different applications and therefore different credentials. The client_id and client_secret that you provide, depends on what API you need to call.

REQUEST

POST https://api-uat.pivotts.com/oem-cisco/cisco-identity/

HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: {subscription_key}

grant_type=client_credentials&client_id={client_id}&client_secret={client_secret}

You should receive the following response assuming that all fields are valid. access_token is the one to be used for the API call..

RESPONSE

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

content-type: application/json;charset=utf-8

{

"access_token": "{access_token}",

"token_type": "Bearer",

"expires_in": 3599

}

Cisco's default lifetime for an access-token is 3600 seconds (1 hour), after which time you will need to acquire a new access-token by replicating the authorization process over again.

You may re-authorize (redo the OAuth v2.0 grant flow) at any time to get a new access-token (with a fresh expiry).