Introduction to the SDK

Overview

The Manage ONTAP SDK delivers resources to develop third-party applications that monitor and manage NetApp. The Manage ONTAP SDK delivers Enterprise-Readiness by allowing seamless integration of NetApp solutions with the existing customer solution. The customer uses the ONTAPI set for security management, license management, backup and recovery, data replication, data archiving, and so on (see figure below).

Components of the Manage ONTAP SDK

Contents

The Manage ONTAP SDK Help contains information about the following sections:

Programming Guide provides details about the APIs used for SDK client application development. This section contains the following:

SDK Core APIs contain details about the APIs that are used for session management and server communication by the client application.
Data ONTAP APIs contain details about the APIs provided by Data ONTAP to manage NetApp storage systems.

Sample Code contains sample programs that demonstrate the usage of the SDK Core APIs and the Data ONTAP APIs.

Design Guide contains documentation that describes how to use a set of Data ONTAP APIs to develop applications for a particular solution domain. This section contains the following:

Performance Management provides documentation about using performance APIs to get the data for analyzing the performance of NetApp storage system.
Block Access Management provides information about using NetApp open interfaces to manage the block access protocols, such as iSCSI, FCP, and block access entities like LUNs, initiator groups, and portsets for NetApp storage systems.
Unified Capacity Management provides details about using NetApp open interfaces for Unified Capacity management.

Troubleshooting provides tips and FAQs. This section contains the following:

Troubleshooting Guidelines documents scenarios that include the cause, a troubleshooting method, and a workaround.
Frequently Asked Questions contains queries put forward by the SDK users.

Utilities contains information about the tools bundled in the SDK that assist users with API usage.

apitest is the command-line tool to test the APIs.
ZExplore is the graphical tools for Windows users to test the APIs.

References provides additional information useful for SDK users. This section contains the following:

Introduction to Unified Storage contains information about NetApp storage systems, such as the hardware, configuration, protocols, and so on.
Other NetApp Management Interfaces provides information about other management interfaces, such as NDMP, SNMP, SMI-S, and so on.

The following table lists the common tasks that management applications can perform and the recommendations API-set(s) to be use.

Tasks to be performed	Which interface to use
Storage system and NetCache discovery	SNMP
Network monitoring and overall system health monitoring	SNMP
Backup and data migration	NDMP
Management of standard CIFS features such as shares, directories, and file permissions	Windows 32 API
Security analysis	syslogs or Windows audit log
Management of NetApp specific functionality such as SnapMirror, Snapshot copies, quotas and so on	ONTAPI
Command-line interface	rsh or ssh or Telnet or console

API Documentation for VPolicy is no longer part of the Manage ONTAP SDK.

For more information about VPolicy, send e-mail to AdvantageDeveloper@netapp.com.