Overview
In recent years, a lot of businesses have been drawn to the important role that Application APIs play in enhancing the business model for a company. The focus has been more towards how developers can benefit and how APIs can help this group to introduce new capabilities.
Key Benefits of Using API
Automation
Applications with API capabilities enable teams like engineering and operations to embrace automation easily, thereby achieving repetitive Jobs execution quickly and increasing the overall productivity.
Application Usage
APIs make an application’s internal components easily accessible, which enhances the usage of the application. This helps external users to make better use of the extracted data from within their own environment.
Integration
APIs allow applications data to be extracted from any third-party application easily. This guarantees integrated user experience and flexible information delivery.
Value Proposition
Supports like a stateless protocol and standard operations enable Kovair RESTful API to perform faster and deliver reliable solutions by reusing ESB components that can be managed and updated without affecting the rest of the system in place.
Leveraging the Kovair Platform
API is a piece of software that makes Applications more interactive when it comes to data sharing. This enables third-party tools to mash-up data into the Kovair platform and obtains benefits like workflow process decisions, reports engine, and data routing to multiple connected tools. Distributed data from various tools turn into meaningful metrics when collaborated in the Kovair ALM platform framework. Refer Fig 1.0.
Fig 1.0Example: Consider an organization where each of the departments is using multiple disparate and disconnected tools while working on their projects. In such a scenario, the management strives for a single window to get real-time visibility on the progress of all the ongoing projects. They do not have any choice but to adopt the manual process to collect relevant data from each of the tools and further process it to prepare the required reports and metrics to gain visibility on the projects. This still can be managed when the number of projects is small. But in a large enterprise, where the number of projects is huge, such manual data collection, processing and reports generation is quite a mammoth task. Unless data and applications are integrated in a unified ecosystem, it is difficult to define the strategic objectives that will help an organization to meet the market demands. Beyond the Point to Point and further ESB integration models, the need to connect everything has given rise to a new integration approach – the API integration platform.
Developed on this technology, Kovair RESTful API interface is capable of interacting with more than 90 commercial tools from different domains of ALM, PLM, ITSM & PPM thereby eliminating the need to know individual tool APIs. Since the Kovair platform is a central repository for Solutions like DevOps, Agile, Defect Management, Releases raw data can be extracted from the platform to the best-of- the breed tools for generating organization-specific reports. Kovair APIs can support IT teams to provide workspace and Kovair Omnibus configurations from their own tools. It can be used to push data to the platform from external resources to build a data repository as well as extract data from the connected tools directly using API, Platform and Adapter.
Kovair Platform as Central Repository
The analytics industry has seen a paradigm shift in how analytics tools are selected and used. In addition, it has been observed that generated data from software systems can function as a key analytical tool, thus empowering organizations to predict and project. In line with the growing importance of analytics tools, there has also been an active need for feeding the data to BI tools.
Using Kovair Restful API, data from Kovair central repository can be synched to any BI tool for generating desired metrics. Most of the Industrywide ALM tools do not have capabilities to integrate with any BI tool. When these tools are integrated with Kovair Platform, Kovair API can act as the Gateway for data to siphon to BI tools. Refer to Fig 2.0.
Fig 2.0Example: Consider an organization that is using Kovair ALM to manage the various phases of an ALM lifecycle like Requirements, Test, Defects and Tasks, and further the data can be self-contained or imported from 90+ tools that Kovair has adapters for integrating with Kovair Omnibus platform.
Consuming Kovair Rest API, an organization can seamlessly make the Requirements, Tests, Defects and Tasks data available to any of the popular analytical tools in the market today. Once the data is in the analytical tool, the analytical user has immense power of querying the same in an unlimited number of ways.
Kovair Rest API also provides incremental data to the target tool at regular intervals. This ensures that the target tools will always have updated real-time data that organizations can put to use.
Kovair Omnibus Configuration
Kovair Restful API allows external users, to set up an Omnibus integration between tools using the API.
The Omnibus configuration API offers you the opportunity to integrate and manage your configuration within your own toolchain. The fine-grained structure of each configuration object allows you to build predefined configuration templates. These templates can be maintained within your own version management system and automatically used by your automation pipeline to provide an integration setup between tools.
If a similar kind of integrations is to be set up frequently, then one can create automation script that interacts with Kovair API to execute the jobs within minutes.
Extracting data from integrated tools using Omnibus and API
An API is useful for pulling specific information from another application. With Kovair Omnibus integration in place, an external application can pull data directly from the repository-based tools like Jira through Kovair Platform. Kovair API provides a tool agonistic interface for fetching the data from the applications like Jira, TFS and many more. The user may not need to know Jira or other Tool API; the only API they need to know is Kovair Rest API.
Data from the tool can be used by external applications for further analysis. Moreover, in cases, data from the external applications can be pushed to Omnibus integrated tools.
For example, using Kovair Rest API in conjunction with Omnibus, an external user can fetch List of bugs and its details directly from the multiple Jira applications.
Conclusion
Currently, RESTful APIs for any enterprise application is being regarded as the Next Generation to SOA Architectures. Organizations offering cloud-based software and services are heavily delving into RESTful API. It is therefore important for organizations and their software platforms to open the Gateway of API for the future.
