ALTR RestAPI
Connecting to the ALTR Rest API for more insight on your security and governance
Cloud technologies open a new era in leveraging data in an easy and elegant way. Data providers publishing REST APIs that enable data pulls from those data providers is a great example of this phenomenon.
But if it was too easy, we would not need to write this blog today. Each REST API has its own way of working and its little secrets when it comes to connection. So let us give you a hand on the ALTR Rest API using Matillion and Snowflake.
Codex Consulting focuses on helping SMBs in integrating any data sources (cloud, on prem, structured or not) into a centralized cloud data platform, thanks to Snowflake. So, we make the complexity of all the formats, protocols, data types out there much easier. Matillion is our data integration platform of choice to streamline any data pipelines and deliver the promised value to our customers.
ALTR is our choice to secure, govern and monitor data consumption.
So, we wanted to share what we have learned to streamline ALTR data into your Snowflake environment.
Ready for the ride? Follow the guide :-)
- All the steps needed in ALTR.
We connect to altrnet.live.altr.com, go to Settings then Preferences and choose the 3rd tab API, click on Add New to create a new Token.
Add a Key Name …
Save the secret, we will use it in the next step.
Then go to swagger https://altrnet.live.altr.com/api/swagger/. Click on the Authorize button to authenticate.
The UserName is the key Name generated in ALTR account and the password is the Key secret.
After we choose the endpoint we want, in this blog we will extract the data in our ALTR account.
2 - In Matillion - Create an API profile.
When connected to Matillion, see the Manage API Profiles entry in the Project menu.
…And add a new profile for the ALTR API:
Let’s go step by step to configure it properly. Add a name for your ALTR API. This is the name that will appear when you use the API query component.
Time to configure your endpoint!
The ALTR API endpoint is https://altrnet.live.altr.com/api Choose in the Auth tab the basic authentication.
Use the credentials from step 1 above.
Add the following parameters (if you used the below URL, Matillion will create them for you automagically):
Moving on to Response configuration, Matillion is smart enough to understand the API Metadata and the hierarchy. Unless you want to call the API by smaller requests (by ‘page’), leave this page as suggested by Matillion:
And that’s it! Enough of boring config! Now let the fun begin and let’s retrieve our data from ALTR!
3 - Retrieving the ALTR data in Snowflake with the Matillion API Query component.
Now that we successfully connected Matillion to ALTR, let’s pull that long awaited data into Snowflake!
We will do this through the API Query (orchestration) component, and we will use the connection we just created.
And this is again where the magic is happening! No need to create the table in Snowflake. The component is smart enough to create it for us with the appropriate data type!
We can of course look at the data directly from Matillion, with the ‘sample’ tab.
4 - Conclusion
Connecting to web services/ REST APIs is a walk in the park with Matillion. The level of automation built in is impressive and a big time-saver for data engineers, enabling a turnaround in minutes to leverage data in the cloud.
The native Matillion-Snowflake integration pushes the ease further, as Snowflake artefacts (tables…) are managed straight by Matillion, which ‘knows’ the API metadata and translates into the right object in Snowflake.