Server API

This section of the guide shows you how to access programming features of the console server engine by using your own scripts.

With the console you can create your own custom tasks and actions, giving you a wide range of options for controlling and monitoring your networks in accordance with your own best practices. As powerful as that is, there are some problems that are best solved with direct access to the console engine itself. The power of the console then becomes yours to control and automate with custom scripts.

Using the server application programming interface, you can create relevance expressions and execute them as if you were logged in to the console. You can use your own scripts to generate fresh content, including Fixlets, tasks, actions, baselines, properties, and analyses. The Server API consists of a set of Component Object Model (COM) objects that are distributed in the form of a DLL file. The API was created with Active Template Library (ATL) and C++ but can be accessed by using COM from a variety of languages and scripting environments, including VBScript, JScript, Perl, and C#.

To use the API, the calling application creates a BESAPI object with an associated set of methods and properties. There are different BESAPI objects for each task one might undertake by using the Tivoli BigFix console, such as creating an action or task (BESAPI.XMLImporter) or managing site subscriptions (BESAPI.SiteManager).

Note: Tivoli BigFix was previously called the BigFix Enterprise System (BES), and you can still see this legacy in the names of the API calls.

The content that you create for the Server API is in XML format that is saved in files with an extension of .bes. This guide provides you with a detailed description of the XML schema that is used by .bes files.