Vendor-neutral, colocation data centers are playing a major role in enterprise digital transformations, as enterprises switch to distributed architectures that enable them to get closer to dispersed markets and users at the digital edge, for secure, lower-latency connectivity.
But the adoption of third-party data centers also requires greater visibility of physical infrastructure and services performance.
Equinix can help fill this gap with IBX SmartView, a data center infrastructure management Software-as-a-Service product designed to give customers end-to-end monitoring of their data center footprint.
As Ravi Ravishankar, Equinix’s VP of Product Management and Product Marketing, told Network World, “For enterprises and cloud service providers, their IT infrastructure is a key piece of their delivery chain. IBX SmartView gives them the peace of mind that their operations and infrastructure are running smoothly.”
IBX SmartView is delivered through the Equinix Customer Portal (ECP) and provides real-time visibility into trended environmental and operating status information relevant to a customers’ data center footprint.
By offering a comprehensive set of REST Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and supportive real-time APIs for partners as an extension to the IBX SmartView application, Equinix provides greater flexibility to consume data through near real-time and pragmatic REST APIs.
What are APIs?
APIs are a method of software delivery that is critical to helping customers quickly automate and scale data center monitoring capabilities. In simple terms, APIs transform human-usable management systems into machine-usable systems that can typically be run side by side.
These systems provide configuration capabilities and state monitoring programmability, which is key for “software defined everything” data center monitoring. Programmability brings scale to administrative tasks and the ability to rapidly respond to changes in the environment.
Equinix began an incremental API rollout in June, and it will extend throughout the remainder of the year. The rollout offers:
- Relevant real-time and trended data views into single pane of glass monitoring system, as if those assets were presented in-house.
- Real-time feeds, for updates when any event occurs.
Its capabilities are further outlined in the graphic below:
What is an IBX SmartView API?
IBX SmartView APIs are broadly classified into two categories: Near real-time and RESTful. These APIs allow customers to build real-time dashboards and integrate real-time feeds with their automation systems.
Near real-time feeds (Don’t call us, we will call you) make it easy to build application-specific or machine-to-machine (M2M) integration to consume real-time data feeds. Below is an overview of the IBX SmartView near real-time messaging API:
Everything is eventual. Each action will be provided as an event to the customer with defined payloads. A customer will be able to subscribe to any specific event or multiple events. Equinix real-time APIs are generally a publish/subscribe messaging pattern-based API that allow a customer to receive events from the Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) platform in real-time.
Real-time APIs are the 21st century version of hardware interrupts: Instead of wasteful polling, your application is notified when an event occurs. Below is an overview of the IBX SmartView near real-time partner API Catalog:
With a simplified real-time onboarding flow, customers can register for near real-time feeds in a matter of minutes.
IBX SmartView REST API
Clients and services share the same standards, so they can understand each other, despite the client not knowing the implementation details of the service. REST APIs are focused on the customer experience, which is created by orchestrating one or more private APIs.
Domain-Driven Design-based API modeling is a technique to decompose a large problem space into domains. Those domain models are organized based on service offerings. Below is an overview of the SmartView REST API catalog:
In a RESTful system, resources are stored in a Data Store, where a client sends a request to a server to perform a particular action (such as creating, retrieving, updating, or deleting a resource), and, in turn, the server performs the requested action and sends back a response, often in the form of a representation of the specified payload mention in the API catalog.
With the RESTful APIs, the client specifies an action using an HTTP verb such as POST, GET, PUT or DELETE.
The IBX SmartView API catalog will continue to grow over the remainder of 2017. APIs that are currently available include:
- Power REST API: Real-time and trending data access to power usage information for customer cabinets and circuits in a given IBX
- Power Real-Time API: Near real-time feeds for IoT (M2M) integration, workflow automation and building real-time dashboards through APIs.
- Location Hierarchy: All the IBX Infra asset details that are relevant to the customer, based on the cage/cabinet location and the installed power circuits
- Real-Time Subscription APIs: APIs to subscribe and configure to real-time events and feeds.
Questions? Feedback? Want to know more about Data Center Infrastructure Management APIs? Check out the Equinix Developer Platform or email us at: api-experience@equinix.com.
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