Problem

This article describes the way to obtain statistical data for the number of transfers that went through SecureTransport for a given time frame or protocol with the help of the SecureTransport's REST API.

Table of contents

• Preparations
• Number of transfers per day
• Number of transfers per month
• Number of transfers per day for HTTPS protocol
• Number of transfers per day for FTP protocol
• Number of transfers per day for PeSIT protocol
• Number of transfers per day for SSH protocol
• Number of failed transfers per day

Preparations

To send queries to the ST API, you'd need a REST client application. The examples below are created with cURL on Linux.

Accessing the API

The variable placeholders used in the commands are described in the below table and have to be replaced with the real values for your server before executing the commands.

Date formatting

To get the records for specific time frame (day, week, month, etc.), you will need to specify the start time and the end time of the time frame in the API call. The date is required in RFC2822 string format:

EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z

An example string would be:

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 16:00:00 +0000

The date string must be URL encoded in order to be accepted by the API. You can use an online encoder like URLEncode, or convert the string in Bash with the following command:

date -R  | sed "s/ /%20/g" | sed "s/+/%2b/g"| sed "s/:/%3A/g" | sed "s/,/%2C/g"

NOTE: The last two instances of the sed can be omitted, although it's recommended to encode all characters with the full command.

The example date from above - Thu, 14 Dec 2017 16:00:00 +0000 - will become:

Thu%2C%2014%20Dec%202017%2016%3A00%3A00%20%2B0000

The resulting string can be now used in the API call syntax.

Filtering the output

The results from the API will contain each transfer as a separate JSON or XML object, so methods like counting the lines in the result will not return correct values. One possible approach is to pipe the results to a grep for a unique word contained in each result object and then to count the output of the grep with wc -l, which will give the total number of objects in the main result, i.e. the number of transfers. More examples are shown below.

Number of transfers per day ↑

API call:

curl -k -u <ST Admin User>:<ST Admin Password> -X GET --header 'Accept: application/xml' 'https://<ST Server IP/FQDN>:<ST Admin Port>/api/v1.2/transfers?limit=100000&offset=0&startTimeAfter=Thu%2C%2014%20Dec%202017%2000%3A00%3A01%20%2B0000&endTimeBefore=Thu%2C%2014%20Dec%202017%2023%3A59%3A59%20%2B0000' | grep "<filesize>" | wc -l

The above query should return a number, which would be the number of transfers between 14/12/2017 00:00:01 and 14/12/2017 23:59:59. You would just need to change the values for the startTimeAfter and endTimeBefore attributes with ones that would cover the day of interest and use the date converting methods mentioned above. You can get the values for several days and calculate their median. This can be automated with a bash script.

Number of transfers per month ↑

API call:

curl -k -u <ST Admin User>:<ST Admin Password> -X GET --header 'Accept: application/xml' 'https://<ST Server IP/FQDN>:<ST Admin Port>/api/v1.2/transfers?limit=100000&offset=0&startTimeAfter=Fri%2C%201%20Dec%202017%2000%3A00%3A01%20%2B0000&endTimeBefore=Sun%2C%2031%20Dec%202017%2023%3A59%3A59%20%2B0000' | grep "<filesize>" | wc -l

The above query should return a number, which would be the number of transfers between 01/12/2017 00:00:01 and 31/12/2017 23:59:59. You would just need to change the values for the startTimeAfter and endTimeBefore attributes with ones that would cover the month/moths of interest and use the date converting methods mentioned above.

Number of transfers per day for HTTPS protocol ↑

API call:

curl -k -u <ST Admin User>:<ST Admin Password> -X GET --header 'Accept: application/xml' 'https://<ST Server IP/FQDN>:<ST Admin Port>/api/v1.2/transfers?limit=100000&offset=0&startTimeAfter=Fri%2C%201%20Dec%202017%2000%3A00%3A01%20%2B0000&endTimeBefore=Sun%2C%2031%20Dec%202017%2023%3A59%3A59%20%2B0000&protocol=http' | grep "<filesize>" | wc -l

The above query should return a number, which would be the number of transfers between 14/12/2017 00:00:01 and 14/12/2017 23:59:59 which use the https protocol.

Number of transfers per day for FTP protocol ↑

API call:

curl -k -u <ST Admin User>:<ST Admin Password> -X GET --header 'Accept: application/xml' 'https://<ST Server IP/FQDN>:<ST Admin Port>/api/v1.2/transfers?limit=100000&offset=0&startTimeAfter=Fri%2C%201%20Dec%202017%2000%3A00%3A01%20%2B0000&endTimeBefore=Sun%2C%2031%20Dec%202017%2023%3A59%3A59%20%2B0000&protocol=ftp' | grep "<filesize>" | wc -l

Same query as for http, but the parameter protocol was set to ftp.

Number of transfers per day for PeSIT protocol ↑

API call:

curl -k -u <ST Admin User>:<ST Admin Password> -X GET --header 'Accept: application/xml' 'https://<ST Server IP/FQDN>:<ST Admin Port>/api/v1.2/transfers?limit=100000&offset=0&startTimeAfter=Fri%2C%201%20Dec%202017%2000%3A00%3A01%20%2B0000&endTimeBefore=Sun%2C%2031%20Dec%202017%2023%3A59%3A59%20%2B0000&protocol=pesit' | grep "<filesize>" | wc -l

Same query as for http, but the parameter protocol was set to pesit.

Number of transfers per day for SSH protocol ↑

API call:

curl -k -u <ST Admin User>:<ST Admin Password> -X GET --header 'Accept: application/xml' 'https://<ST Server IP/FQDN>:<ST Admin Port>/api/v1.2/transfers?limit=100000&offset=0&startTimeAfter=Fri%2C%201%20Dec%202017%2000%3A00%3A01%20%2B0000&endTimeBefore=Sun%2C%2031%20Dec%202017%2023%3A59%3A59%20%2B0000&protocol=ssh' | grep "<filesize>" | wc -l

Same query as for http, but the parameter protocol was set to ssh.

Number of failed transfers per day ↑

API call:

curl -k -u <ST Admin User>:<ST Admin Password> -X GET --header 'Accept: application/xml' 'https://<ST Server IP/FQDN>:<ST Admin Port>/api/v1.2/transfers?limit=100000&offset=0&status=Failed&startTimeAfter=Fri%2C%201%20Dec%202017%2000%3A00%3A01%20%2B0000&endTimeBefore=Sun%2C%2031%20Dec%202017%2023%3A59%3A59%20%2B0000' | grep "<filesize>" | wc -l

Setting the query string status=Failed will return only transfers, which ended in error for all protocols. The status can be set to the various values from the table above. Any of those can be combined with a protocol parameter to narrow down the transfers with this status for the specific protocol.