REST API considerations

You can use BigFix Inventory REST API to retrieve large amounts of data that is related to computer systems, software instances, and license usage in your environment. Such information can then be passed to other applications for further processing and analysis.

Although using single API requests to retrieve data only from a selected subset of computers does not greatly impact the performance of BigFix Inventory, this is not true when retrieving data in bulk for all your computer systems at the same time. Such an action requires the processing of large amounts of data and it always influences the application performance and when possible should not be executed during data import.

In general, the API requests should not be used together with other performance intensive tasks, like software scans or data imports. Each user that is logged in to the application, as well as the number of actions that are performed in the web user interface during the REST API calls also decrease the performance.
Important: Each time you want to retrieve data through REST API, ensure that the use of BigFix Inventory at a moderate level, so that the extra workload resulting from REST API does not overload the application and create performance problems.

Special considerations

  1. The application that calls the API is controls the size of individual response for API calls. BigFix Inventory server should have enough memory to receive and save the responses.
  2. Check only for changes in data and do not fetch all the data every time. Use valid_from / valid_to or discovery_start / discovery_end fields to retrieve changes.
  3. When you complete your data import, BigFix Inventory no more calls APIs. In case, you attempt to perform this process, the request may fail with a misleading error. It is recommended to implement an option for the application to retry the request after some time.