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API reference

Argus is a REST API with a web client on top of it. Everything the product does, it does through that API.

Two distinct credential types, for two distinct callers:

Caller Credential
Users JWT bearer tokens, issued at sign-in
Agents A per-agent API key, obtained by exchanging a one-time enrollment token at first boot

The two are not interchangeable. An agent key cannot act as a user, and a user token cannot submit scan results. Agent credentials and their rotation are covered in Credentials: Bootstrap vs Manual and Agents.

Worth knowing because it explains sign-out behaviour you will otherwise find puzzling. Defaults:

Setting Default Effect
Access token lifetime 30 minutes Refreshed transparently while you are active
Refresh token lifetime 24 hours
Idle timeout 15 minutes Signed out after inactivity
Absolute session lifetime 8 hours Re-authentication required regardless of activity

The absolute lifetime is the one that surprises people: a full working day at the console ends with a sign-in prompt even though you never went idle. That is intentional, and it is the control that bounds how long a stolen session can remain useful.

Background polling deliberately does not reset the idle timer. If it did, simply leaving a dashboard open would keep a session alive indefinitely and the idle timeout would mean nothing.

Until there is a published API, the supported export paths are:

  • Reports for the formal artefacts: compliance reports, gap analysis, executive summary, audit log, PII summary, and more, all as CSV.
  • Table exports on most pages, which export the current filtered view. Filter first, then export, and the file matches what you reviewed.

Both are covered by the same guarantees: exports carry counts and metadata, never the sensitive values themselves, and compliance exports exclude hidden and stale datastores while surfacing the count of what was excluded.

When endpoints are published, a removed endpoint will be replaced by a 410 Gone for one release, carrying Deprecation and Sunset headers and a body pointing at its replacement, and only deleted in the release after that. That deprecation guarantee is what a published reference is worth waiting for.