- Python Requests Library:
When leveraging DNA Center’s API with the requests library, the first thing that needs to be done is getting successfully authenticated. Lets first find the authentication endpoint within DNA Center’s GUI. Click on the search option in the top right corner of the homepage, then type in ‘API’.
The very first API endpoint found in this section is for authentication.
After sending a valid username and password, DNAC will respond with a token that can be used for the remainder of the session in the call headers. Below is a bit of Python that shows this in action.
The Token, pulled from the authentication response, is labeled ‘token’ and is added to the headers with “x-auth-token”. At the bottom is a print statement to print out the token, which verifies authentication works properly. From here on out additional API calls can be entered below to gather information from DNAC.
The above calls the network device list endpoint and prints the response in JSON format.
Making API calls to DNAC with Postman is similar to the Python Requests method. We’re authenticating with Basic Auth, hitting the token API endpoint and receiving a Token. Moving forward that Token will be used to gather additional data from the API.
To authenticate and receive a valid Token from DNAC, the POST endpoint https://<dnacenterIPorFQDN/dna/system/api/v1/auth/token will be used, along with a username and password using basic Auth.
In the API documentation we’ll see that additional header variables need to be added.
The Authorization will be Base 64 encoding, which essentially just needs a string Basic with a space, then the string YWRtaW46TWFnbGV2MTIz. After hitting Send to DNAC, we’ll receive the needed Token, per below:
Now moving forward, this Token needs to be added as a variable to each API call to DNA Center. Below is an example of getting a list of devices from DNA Center with Postman.
The process is very similar to Python requests library, but with a GUI that can give out code examples if needed.
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