Welcome to the Tenable API Ecosystem!

Tenable Vulnerability Management is the world’s first Cyber Exposure platform, giving you complete visibility into your network and helping you to manage and measure your modern attack surface. All the capabilities of Vulnerability Management and Web App Scanning are available in the API, a robust platform for users of all experience levels. The platform is designed to support and visualize elastic IT assets, such as containers and web apps. Tenable offers pre-built integrations and allows developers to build new integrations quickly in order to improve their vulnerability management program.

Using the API, you can seamlessly integrate Tenable Vulnerability Management into your cybersecurity infrastructure, for example:

  • Automate asset data import into Vulnerability Management.
  • Import third-party scan data.
  • Export scan results from Vulnerability Management into a workflow management system for remediation.

Get Started

Tenable provides resources to allow users of all skill levels to interact with the Tenable Vulnerability Management API.

Novice Users

For novice users without developer experience, Tenable provides a command-line interface tool called navi to easily interact with the API and automate common tasks in Cyber Exposure or Vulnerability Management. With over 100 commands, navi can be used to automate and enrich VM and Asset data to provide more accurate reporting or help support more advanced use-cases.

For more information, see navi's GitHub wiki.

Intermediate Users

The optimal and recommended way for intermediate users to interact with the API is to use Tenable's pyTenable python library. This library was created to help users easily develop their own custom tools and scripts for interacting with the API. Additionally, pyTenable is a great choice if you intend to develop against other Tenable products such as Tenable Security Center.

Tenable recommends that you use this library for both testing and production because it provides standard interfaces that handle authentication and request construction for you. The pyTenable GitHub repository provides detailed explanations for getting started, and the recipes page provides pyTenable samples for common API tasks.

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Tip

For an introduction to pyTenable, see Introduction to pyTenable by Steve McGrath.

For intermediate users that do not use a Python environment, you can use the API Explorer to generate code samples in other languages for the endpoints you wish to utilize.

Advanced Users and Developers

The API Explorer provides documentation for all publicly available Tenable product API endpoints. It provides reference information for endpoint URLs, HTTP methods, input parameters, response schemas, and more.

Tenable provides the API Explorer for advanced users that want to know exactly how the API works so they can develop their own custom tools and integrations. Advanced users can use the API Explorer to construct API queries and retrieve client request code samples in multiple languages. The API Explorer can be used to directly interact with the API in order to test API calls.

Additionally, for advanced users familiar with Python, Tenable provides a Python library called pyTenable. This library provides many functions for common Vulnerability Management and Web App Scanning API tasks, and makes the development of integrations quick and easy. For more information, see the PyTenable Reference Documentation.

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Tip

Tenable provides some pre-built pyTenable recipes for common API tasks. For example, exporting vulnerability and asset data.