Enabling Web services

In Siren Investigate, Web services provide the infrastructure for retrieving data from external APIs.

You must enable Web services manually by including the following code block in the Investigate server configuration file:

web_services:
  global:
    enabled: true

A Web service driver is an Investigate plug-in that contains a group of one or more Web services.

Some Web service drivers are provided by Siren, but you can also create your own by using the Web service interface. For more information, see Extending Web services.

After you install these drivers, you must restart Siren Investigate.

The following Web services drivers are available and require tokens:

Webhose
JsonWhois
Twitter

web_services:
  webhose:
    config:
      auth_token: 'my-token'
  jsonwhois:
    config:
      auth_token: 'my-token'
  twitter:
    config:
      key: 'my-consumer-api-key'
      secret: 'my-consumer-api-secret'

The Web service manager plug-in provides an invocation visualisation that allows you to invoke one or more Web services from any dashboard.

This plug-in also creates a Web services dashboard that allows you to query any Web service and see the results immediately in an adjacent table.

On this dashboard, select from the list of registered Web services, and click the Back button to fill in the required inputs and retrieve the data.

Disabling Web services

Web services groups can be individually disabled by setting the enabled property in the Investigate server configuration file to 'false':

# web_services.<group>.enabled
web_services:
  twitter:
    enabled: false

Web services can be globally disabled as follows:

web_services:
  global:
    enabled: false

This disables all Web service drivers as well as the Web services feature itself.

Automatic setup of UI components

When Siren Investigate starts up with one or more registered Web services, the following saved objects are created automatically:

Type Name Description

Type	Name	Description
Search	Web service data	Based on the index pattern `web-service-*`, it captures all data relating to Web services.
Visualization	Query Web services	An instance of the Query Web service visualization, it is configured to allow the user to query any of the registered Web services.
Visualization	Invocation results	An instance of the Record table visualization, it displays documents in the Web Service Data search and is used to display the results of an invocation.
Dashboard	Web services	Displays the two visualizations that are used to query and see the results of invocations.

Web service data

Based on the index pattern web-service-*, it captures all data relating to Web services.

Visualization

Query Web services

An instance of the Query Web service visualization, it is configured to allow the user to query any of the registered Web services.

Visualization

Invocation results

An instance of the Record table visualization, it displays documents in the Web Service Data search and is used to display the results of an invocation.

Dashboard

Web services

Displays the two visualizations that are used to query and see the results of invocations.

The automatic creation of these saved objects can be disabled in the Siren Investigate configuration file, by setting the disable_ui_component_setup parameter to true as follows:

web_services:
  global:
    enabled: true
    disable_ui_component_setup: true

If you set the parameter to true, you must set up these saved objects manually in order to query Web services from the UI. Regardless of this setting, querying from scripts and watchers will still work.