Automating Infrastructure Documentation with Obelinf

Your infrastructure documentation is only as valuable as it is current. When a device gets decommissioned, a subnet gets reallocated, or a cable run changes, the documentation needs to reflect that immediately. Manual updates through a web interface work fine when there are a handful of changes per week, but as your network grows and your team adopts continuous delivery workflows, the pace of infrastructure change outstrips what anyone can keep up with by hand. The gap between what is documented and what is actually deployed widens, and your source of truth starts to look more like a historical record than an accurate inventory that your team can trust for incident response and change planning.

The solution is automation. By connecting your infrastructure management platform to your provisioning tools, monitoring systems, CI/CD pipelines, and configuration management workflows, you can ensure that every change is documented at the moment it happens. The key that unlocks this automation is the API key, a programmatic credential that allows scripts, tools, and platforms to interact with your infrastructure data without requiring a human to log in through a browser. This article walks you through what API keys are, how to create them in Obelinf, and how to use them to build automated documentation workflows that keep your source of truth accurate in real time.

Creating an API Key in Obelinf

The process for creating an API key takes about thirty seconds, and you can generate as many keys as you need for different workflows. Start by navigating to your organization in Obelinf and opening the API Keys section from the sidebar menu. You will see a list of any existing keys along with a Create Key button at the top of the page.

Obelinf generates your API key and displays it on screen only once. This is the only time the key is ever visible, so copy and store it in a secure location.

Using the API for Automated Documentation

With your API key created and stored, you can start building automated workflows. Every API request to Obelinf requires the key to be sent as a Bearer token in the Authorization header.

Most programming languages have HTTP client libraries that make working with the API straightforward. For example, you can use Python to create a new device record, the exact operation you would automate in a provisioning workflow:

import os
import requests

api_key = os.environ["OBELINF_KEY"]
org_slug = "my-org"
headers = {
    "Authorization": f"Bearer {api_key}",
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
}

new_device = {
    "name": "web-prod-01",
    "device_type": "server",
    "status": "active",
    "site_id": "01ARZ3NDEKTSV4RRFFQ69G5FAV",
}

response = requests.post(
    f"https://api.obelinf.com/{org_slug}/devices",
    headers=headers,
    json=new_device,
)
response.raise_for_status()
device = response.json()
print(f"Created device {device['name']} with ID {device['id']}")

When you automate device creation in your provisioning pipeline, every server, switch, or firewall that gets deployed is automatically documented with no manual data entry required. The same approach applies to updating device status, managing cable connections, assigning IP addresses, and tracking circuit information.

Building Real World Automation Workflows

A common integration point is your infrastructure provisioning tooling. When a provisioning workflow creates a new server, you add a step that calls the Obelinf API to create a corresponding device record. This ensures that the device appears in your documentation at the same moment it becomes operational, not days or weeks later when someone gets around to updating the inventory manually. The same approach works for decommissioning: your decommissioning script can archive the device record and disconnect its interfaces in the same step that powers down the hardware.

For teams using configuration management tools, API keys enable automatic reconciliation of IP address assignments, VLAN configurations, and DNS records. Your configuration management system can query Obelinf for the current state of each resource and flag any discrepancies, turning your documentation into an active validation layer rather than a static record that drifts out of sync over time.

Security

Obelinf provides a complete API platform designed for infrastructure automation. API keys are scoped to your organization and support granular permission levels, so you can give read only access to monitoring tools and full access to provisioning systems without compromising security.

The API itself exposes every resource in Obelinf: devices, sites, racks, interfaces, cables, IP addresses, subnets, VLANs, circuits, and more. Whether you need to read the current state of your infrastructure, create new resources during provisioning, or update existing records during decommissioning, the API follows consistent patterns that integrate easily with any programming language or tool. For teams that need programmatic access to their infrastructure documentation, Obelinf provide the authentication mechanism that makes automation practical and secure.

You can create your account for free at obelinf.com and start building the automated workflows that will keep your source of truth accurate without requiring anyone on your team to manually update device records or reconcile spreadsheets.