FTD - Rest API to find usages of object

[jon12]

I am trying to delete certain objects using FTD Rest API such as network objects or url objects.

Whenever one of them is being used by a rule or a group, the deletion is being prevented.

I was trying to find a way to get all usages of an object so I could clean it up before deletion, but didn't see one.

Is there an API that gives back all references of an object?

Thank you in advance.

[jarsmith · Accepted solution]

I wish I had a better answer for you but we don't have a usages API at the moment I can tell you this is something we have talked about internally and there were some prototypes but it hasn't made it into a release yet.  I very much understand the ask and I can totally see the usefulness as we wanted something similar to show usages in the user interface.  (I'll do my best to push for this next time I get a chance)

My suggestion in the meantime would be to check the usual suspects:

- Access Rules

- Decryption Rules

- Identity Rules

- RA VPN

And check if you have a reference to that ID value.  If you wanted to make a crude script to accomplish this you could look for any JSON document that has a nested dict with an "id" field defined with the "type" the same as the object that you are investigating.  I know this isn't super efficient but that is probably the best answer until we make a purpose-built API (which would be much simpler..).

[jarsmith · Accepted solution]

One quick follow-up as I just received a suggestion that we also have a free text search API which could be used to simplify a bit.  For example, if you want to find all-access rules that reference a host object named "test_host" you can formulate a query as follows:

https://host:443/api/fdm/v6/policy/accesspolicies/default/accessrules?filter=fts:test_host

This will make it so you don't have to crawl all objects of a given type for the major policy type objects Access, Decryption(SSL), and Identity.

You'd still have to query per type but you'd get a more concise answer this way.  I just tried it on my FDM with 2 rules and it picked the correct rule.