Chapter 1. Interacting with Red Hat Insights APIs

Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a predictive analytics service that helps identify and remediate security, performance, and availability threats to your Red Hat infrastructure. Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is built on APIs (Application Program Interfaces) that supply data and functionality to its various applications. The Insights front end (the user interface, or UI) directly communicates with the back end API (the server) to retrieve and display information. You can interact with Insights through the UI, or create your own custom clients to connect directly to the back end API.

You can use API commands to interact with web services to perform various operations, such as retrieving data, sending data, updating records, and deleting records. Using APIs to interact with Insights enables you to perform Insights operations synchronously or asynchronously, depending on the service and endpoint. The Inventory export service is an example of an asynchronous operation, but most operations work synchronously. You can incorporate API calls into your web-based applications, and you can even automate them.

Using APIs presents many advantages, including:

Insights APIs follow the OpenAPI specification. By default, all Insights API resources are represented in application/json format. In addition, you can also export reports, inventory and maintenance plans as text/csv.