Introduction

In recent years, REST (REpresentational State Transfer) has emerged as the standard architectural design for web services and web APIs.

This documentation describes how to integrate Paragon Active Assurance with a network service orchestrator via the Paragon Active Assurance REST API. This is a RESTful API that adheres to the standardized OpenAPI/Swagger 2.0 definition format, thereby enabling easy and efficient orchestration of Paragon Active Assurance tasks.

(As explained here: "OpenAPI Specification (formerly Swagger Specification) is an API description format for REST APIs. An OpenAPI file allows you to describe your entire API, including: available endpoints (/users) and operations on each endpoint (GET /users, POST /users); operation parameters Input and output for each operation; authentication methods; and contact information, license, terms of use and other information.")

Hands-on examples are given of the principal tasks involved, including:

• creating and deploying Virtual Test Agents
• running tests and monitors
• retrieving results from these activities.

Orchestration through the REST API (that is, using the "write" functions of the API) is available only with on-premise installations of Paragon Active Assurance where the REST API has been installed. Orchestration is not available to users of the Paragon Active Assurance SaaS solution. However, SaaS users do have access to the data retrieval (that is, "read") functions of the REST API.