REST API

The API is broad and versioned. Typical resource areas include public identities and full identity detail, accounts and entitlements, access requests and their status, certifications and campaigns, sources/applications, and configuration objects. In SailPoint Identity Security Cloud these are the well-documented v3/beta endpoints; IdentityIQ exposes its own REST API for the same purposes.

Every call carries an OAuth bearer token. A service integration obtains a token using the client-credentials grant, then sends it on each request:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  "https://tenant.api.identitynow.com/v3/public-identities?filters=alias eq \"jdoe\""

List endpoints support server-side filtering, sorting and pagination. Always filter to what you need and page through large result sets rather than pulling everything, this is faster, cheaper and avoids rate limits. Read the total count from the response headers to know when you have all records.

The REST API is the modern, actively-developed interface. It uses JSON, integrates with every language and tool, is well documented, and is what the SDKs and Postman collections target. Reserve the older SOAP interface for legacy integrations that have no REST equivalent.

• Cache and refresh tokens rather than authenticating on every call.
• Handle 429 (rate limit) and 5xx with exponential backoff.
• Prefer the official SDKs, which wrap auth, pagination and retries.

• Pulling entire collections instead of filtering server-side.
• Ignoring pagination, missing records beyond the first page.
• Hard-coding tokens instead of obtaining them via OAuth.