What version of N-central is required to access the REST APIs?

You need to be running N-central version 2023.9 or later to access the REST APIs through the API Explorer interface.

What is the difference between the JSON web token and the access token in the authentication process?

The JSON web token is used for initial authorization in the Swagger interface, while the access token is obtained by executing the authenticate API call and is required to complete the authentication process and make subsequent API calls.

Accessing REST APIs in N-able N-central

Name: Accessing REST APIs in N-able N-central
Uploaded: 2026-05-12T20:28:39-04:00
Duration: 2 min 42 s
Description: N-able Head Nerd Paul Kelly shows how to access REST APIs in N-able N-central. https://www.n-able.com Connect with N-able: Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/NableMSP/ LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/n-able Twitter - https://twitter.com/Na...

N-able

05/12/2026

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Transcript

and in this video, I'm going to show you how to access the new REST APIs in NCentral. To access the REST APIs, you need to be running NCentral 2023.9 or later. From your NCentral server, in the URL bar, we're going to go to forward slash API Explorer, hit on return, and we're going to load into the Swagger interface, which allows us to navigate and understand all the APIs that are currently available to us. As you scroll down here, we can see the different categories of APIs that are currently available within your NCentral instance. If we click on a category, we can see the different API calls. Get calls are blue, which allow you to extract information from your NCentral server, and post calls are green, which allow you to set information in your NCentral server as well. Before we do any of that, though, we need to first authenticate against the APIs, and we need to use our JSON web token to do so. We showed you how to do that in a previous video. We're going to come up to our authorize button in here. We're going to enter our JSON web token, click on authorize. We're going to click on close and to complete this process, we need an access token, and we do that by running and executing one of the API calls. So we're going to come down to authentication. We're going to click on authenticate. We're going to click on try it out. We're going to click on execute, and in the response body, we're going to see the access token that we need to complete the authentication. So we're going to make a note of this here. Copy this, scroll back up to our authorize button and enter this into the API access token field. We'll go ahead and click on authorize. And we've now authenticated against the rest APIs on your NCentral server. We can now start to extract information from your NCentral server. So if we want to get a list of customers, for example, we can scroll down to our organizational units. We're going to click on our get API customers. In here, we're going to choose to try it out. Now I can choose to sort the customers that I extract, maybe using customer name or customer ID. So I'm going to enter the sort by field, the category I want to sort by. In my case, I'm going to use customer ID. Now it is case sensitive. So you need to make sure you enter the exact field that is retrieved by the API call. I'm going to sort this in ascending order. We're going to choose to execute this. As we scroll down here, we can see the response body, all the different customers, the list of customer information from this particular NCentral server. So, guys, that's how you access the new rest APIs in NCentral. I hope you found this video useful. Hopefully we'll see you on the next one.

TL;DR

REST API access requires N-central version 2023.9 or later and is accessed through the /api-explorer endpoint using the Swagger interface
Authentication is a two-step process: first authorize with a JSON web token, then execute the authenticate API call to obtain an access token
API calls are color-coded in Swagger — blue GET calls extract information while green POST calls set or modify data on the N-central server

Summary

This technical demonstration walks through the process of accessing and authenticating against the REST APIs in N-able N-central version 2023.9 or later. The tutorial covers navigating the Swagger API Explorer interface, understanding the difference between GET and POST API calls, and completing the two-step authentication process using JSON web tokens and access tokens. The demonstration concludes with a practical example of retrieving customer data from the N-central server using the organizational units API endpoint, including how to sort results by specific fields. This foundational knowledge enables MSPs and IT administrators to programmatically interact with their N-central instance for automation and integration purposes.

Chapters

0:00 - Introduction
0:07 - Accessing API Explorer
0:48 - Authentication Process
1:43 - Retrieving Customer Data

Key Quotes

0:07 "To access the REST APIs, you need to be running NCentral 2023.9 or later."
0:38 "Get calls are blue, which allow you to extract information from your NCentral server, and post calls are green, which allow you to set information in your NCentral server as well."
2:09 "Now it is case sensitive. So you need to make sure you enter the exact field that is retrieved by the API call."

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» Cybersecurity » Cloud Security
» Data Protection

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