Endpoints

Setting up Endpoints allows you to define some basic information about the applications you might consider building an integration to. This is also where you set up the information about your product(s), which are presumably on one side of each of the integrations.

These questions are intended to be answered by anybody, even non-technical team members, but they do require you have some basic understanding of APIs and integration.

Configuration Options

General

• Endpoint Name - This is a name that will be used throughout Integration Planner to reference this Endpoint. Usually this is just the name of the application you are considering an integration to, but in some cases a application may have more than one API (e.g. a REST and a GraphQL API). In those cases, create two endpoints and name them accordingly. You can use them both in Projects later.
• Type - What type of API does the application provide? This is usually pretty clear in the developer documentation for a given application. In situations where there are no docs (or they are poor) or you just don't have access to this information.
• Documentation - How well documented is the application and its APIs? This is a little bit of a judgement call, but it's not meant to be precise. Take a quick look at the docs and make your best guess. If you need help, a developer can usually tell you pretty quickly how the docs are.
• Variability - Different software applications require different amounts of customization from user to user. Some enterprise applications are highly configured and customized for each user. Many SMB SaaS apps are basically "what you see is what you get" for everyone. How variying is this application?
• Authentication - What is the authentication mechanism used on the API? This should also be prominently documented.
• Owned - Is this your application or an external application to which you might build an integration? You will want your product(s) defined as Endpoints, too, because integrations will be defined between two endpoints.

How This Is Used

The information you provide about Endpoints will get aggregated to an Difficulty Score, which you can see on the Endpoints grid. This is used in the algorithm to weight the difficult of an integration up or down.

Difficulty Scores hover around 1. They don't mean much on their own, but for comparison purposes they suggest between two given endpoints, which will be harder to integrate to.