Using the Chrome Advanced REST Client with the FlashArray

A question came up on our community about a Chrome extension called Advanced REST Client and I had never used it before, so I decided to check it out. InstallĀ it here. It will add an extension that allows you to make REST calls to, well whatever from your Chrome browser.

***UPDATE My coworker Barkz did an excellent post about this a few months back too, so check it out too***

Of course there are a billion ways to do this (I traditionally have just used Invoke-RestMethod in PowerShell) but this is another one for your tool arsenal . A quick and easy way to pull REST information from the FlashArray without having to learn another tool like PowerShell to do it.

download

Non-disruptive install and then you can launch the extension.

So the first step is to create/fetch the API token for your user with the following command:

https://10.21.10.17/api/1.4/auth/apitoken

Replace the IP with your FlashArray IP or FQDN.

You need to add the username and password values into the payload section of the call, with the content-type set to url encoded.

createapitoken

Do that and hit send. Make sure “post” is selected. You will get a response with your API token, you need this to create an maintain the session.

tokenresponse

You can always see/get/create the tokens from the GUI too:

tokens

Use the following command to create the session:

https://10.21.10.17/api/1.4/auth/session

So i have seen some mixed luck with the next step, the best way to do this is to not put the API token into the payload, but instead as a query parameter. Expand the REST call and add the api_token into the parameter.

createsession

That’s all you need to enter for that. If all goes well, your response will be the username associated with that token ID.

tokenresponsesession

Now you can run your REST calls for info:

So a standard call like:

https://10.21.10.17/api/1.4/volume/testcody

getvolume

Remember to change the radio selection to GET!

Or if you want to add parameters, expand the call and add query parameters. So if I want more space capacity information, using the call:

https://10.21.10.17/api/1.4/volume/VMForkDatastore1?capacity=true

Add the capacity binary option into those query parameters.

spacecapc

Pretty straight forward! Lots of other REST clients of course, but this is a nice one because I spend so much time in Chrome anyways.

As always, you can find the REST API documentation in your FlashArray GUI!

apiguide

 

 

 

3 Replies to “Using the Chrome Advanced REST Client with the FlashArray”

  1. Hi Cody,

    I would like to use rest api (1.5) to get historical stats from pure array with : api/1.5/volume?action=monitor&historical=7d
    But I don’t wand to have all the history but only the last 2 collected value (which are averaged on 30 mn thanks to the “7d” historical resolution) for each volume. So to easily calculate an “1 hour” average value for those performance metrics.

    I’v looked at the documentation but I didn’t find anything. Is there any parameter to get only last n value for performance metrics ? Or at least the last value ?

    Thanks.

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