ActionTrail:Integration overview

Version

Alibaba Cloud uses versions to manage the APIs for major product releases. ActionTrail currently supports the API version 2020-07-06. The string 2020-07-06 is a version identifier, not a date. This identifier represents the latest set of API operations and does not mean that the API is obsolete.

Online debugging

ActionTrail provides API debugging capabilities in OpenAPI Explorer. Before you make an API call, you need to understand the available versions, endpoints, and integration methods for ActionTrail.

On the ActionTrail page in OpenAPI Explorer, the left-side navigation pane lists available APIs by category, such as DescribeRegions for regions and CreateTrail/DeleteTrail for trails. In the central debugging panel, you can select an endpoint, such as China (Shanghai), configure request parameters like AcceptLanguage, and then click Initiate Call to debug the API online. The right-side pane displays the API description and parameter documentation.

Debugging portal

You can access the API debugging portal at: ActionTrail API Debugging List

Endpoints

To minimize latency, select an endpoint in the same region as your resources. For example, in the China (Zhangjiakou) region, the public endpoint for ActionTrail is actiontrail.cn-zhangjiakou.aliyuncs.com, and the VPC endpoint is actiontrail-vpc.cn-zhangjiakou.aliyuncs.com.

• Public endpoints are globally accessible.

• VPC endpoints are accessible only from within a VPC in a specific Alibaba Cloud region. Benefits:

  • High security: VPC endpoints are only accessible from within a VPC.

  • Faster response: Because traffic over a VPC endpoint uses the internal network, response times are typically faster and avoid issues like public network latency and bandwidth limits.

  • Lower costs: VPC endpoints use internal network communication.

For more information, see Endpoints.

Identities

An Alibaba Cloud account has full API access, which poses a security risk. For enhanced security, we recommend using a RAM user for API calls and daily O&M. Before calling an API, grant the RAM user permissions based on your business requirements. The RAM user must have the permissions to manage ActionTrail resources. For more information, see Use RAM for access control.

More information

• Identities, credentials, and authorization

• Throttling and quota management

Integration methods

• Alibaba Cloud SDK

  • Alibaba Cloud provides SDKs for multiple programming languages, including Java, C#, Go, Python, Node.js/TypeScript, PHP, and C++. You can integrate an SDK into your application to directly call APIs. The SDKs encapsulate the signing logic, timeout mechanism, and retry mechanism, and return structured response objects. For more information about Alibaba Cloud SDKs, see Alibaba Cloud SDK.

  • You can use an Alibaba Cloud SDK to call ActionTrail API operations in OpenAPI Explorer. For information about the supported languages and how to install dependencies, see ActionTrail SDK.

• Alibaba Cloud CLI

  • Alibaba Cloud Command Line Interface (CLI) is a general-purpose command-line tool that is built on APIs. You can use Alibaba Cloud CLI to interact with Alibaba Cloud services and manage your Alibaba Cloud resources in a shell. For more information about Alibaba Cloud CLI, see What is Alibaba Cloud CLI?.

  • You can use Alibaba Cloud CLI to call ActionTrail API operations.

• Resource Orchestration Service (ROS)

  • Resource Orchestration Service (ROS) is an Alibaba Cloud service that simplifies cloud resource management. Developers and administrators can write templates to define required Alibaba Cloud resources, such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances and ApsaraDB RDS instances, and the dependencies between these resources. The ROS orchestration engine automatically creates and configures all resources based on the templates to implement automated deployment and O&M. For more information, see What is Resource Orchestration Service?.

  • You can use ROS to call ActionTrail API operations. For more information, see ROS integration example.

• Direct HTTP requests

  If you make direct HTTP requests, you must implement the signing algorithm and construct the HTTP request yourself. For more information about the signature mechanism, see API overview and V3 request body and signature mechanism.