A central cornerstone of our Paessler PRTG monitoring software is its application programming interface, and our great development teams have been working on the new PRTG API v2 for some time now.
In 2021, we released the alpha version of this new API together with the new UI and made it available for testing. In Version 22.4.81, which is due at the end of this year, we plan to drop the recommendation to only use it on test systems and will thus declare it stable enough to be activated on production systems. Then, in early 2023, we plan to declare the first API endpoints as stable, meaning that you can start using the available PRTG API v2 endpoints* for automation and integrations in your production systems.
PRTG API v2 is documented using the OpenAPI Specification to make it easily accessible and interoperable with tools like Swagger or Postman. We intend to deliver an API experience for the user that is industry standard. Using PRTG API v2 should be intuitive enough so that learning and working with the API is fast, and thus creating additional value for your company is that much easier.
What's our vision for PRTG API v2?
Application programming interfaces can be incredibly valuable IT assets for modern enterprises. In fact, research suggests that opening up systems and platforms with APIs can foster growth and success. Marshall Van Alstyne showed that companies utilizing APIs had 12.7% more growth over four years than those that didn't. Over 16 years it was up to 38% more growth. This explains partly why APIs are so popular today: with easy automated access to valuable data, companies can innovate and create much faster.
With this in mind, our PRTG API v2 concept does not only serve the internal need of connecting our PRTG backend to the UI and being an efficient middle layer; we also want to enable technology partners and customers to connect their products and create a unique solution that allows them process improvements and growth.
Most software vendors tell you that their product is the only "magic Swiss army knife" you will ever need. This probably makes sense from a manufacturer's perspective, but it's a dream that can never be achieved. The reality is far too complex and business needs are too varied to make one product fit for all. As a standard software vendor, you can only get as close as possible to "ideal".
With PRTG API v2, we want to open up the possibility to interact with more technology vendors that our customers use. This means delivering data to PRTG and exporting collected details to other systems. Generally speaking, the goal of our customer-facing API is to cover
- retrieval of monitoring data,
- editing of monitoring objects, including the creation of new objects, and
- configuring PRTG itself.
Even though parts of this were already possible with the previous API, the new functions, especially the creation of new objects and the configuration of the entire system, enable completely new automation possibilities.
We are excited to bring all these functionalities to you.