When we rolled out our initial API months ago, we took a first stab at getting the most useful features exposed to help customers get up to speed with the service. A handful of our users expressed displeasure with having to use their login credentials for basic access to the management API. Starting today, we’re pleased to announce support for access tokens within the Circonus API.

Tokens offer fine-grained access for each user to a specific service account, at your permission role or lower. For example, if Bob is a normal user on the Acme Inc. account, he can create tokens allowing normal or read-only access. Multiple applications can use the same token, but each application has to be approved by Bob in the token management page, diabolically named My Tokens. To get started, browse over to this page inside your user profile, select your account from the drop-down and click the “plus tab” to create your first token.


The first time you try to connect with a new application using your token, the API service will hand back a HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required. When you visit the My Tokens page again you’ll see a button to approve the new application-token request. Once this has been approved you’ll be able to connect to the API with your new application-token.


Using the token is even easier. Just pass the token as X-Circonus-Auth-Token and your application name as X-Circonus-App-Name in your request headers. Here’s a basic example using curl from the command-line:

$ curl -H "X-Circonus-Auth-Token: ec45e8a2-d6d9-624c-c21c-a83f573731c1" 
       -H "X-Circonus-App-Name: testapp" 
           https://api.circonus.com/api/json/list_accounts

[{
   "account":"social_networks",
   "account_description":"Monitoring for The Social Network.",
   "account_name":"Social Networks"
   "circonus_metric_limit":500,
   "circonus_metrics_used":124,
}]

One of the more convenient features with our tokens is how well they integrate with user roles. A token will never have higher access permissions than its owner. In fact, if you lower a user’s role on your account, their tokens automatically reflect this as well. Changing a “normal” user to “read-only” will render their tokens the same access level. But if you restore their original role, the token will also have its original privileges restored. Secure and convenient.

If you have any questions about our new API tokens or would like to see more examples with the Circonus API, drop us a line at [email protected].

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