Hey everyone! I've been lurking here for a while, trying to wrap my head around our DDoS protection setup with Prolexic. Honestly, it's been a bit overwhelming 😅. Our team often needs a quick, at-a-glance view of our current mitigation status without diving into the full portal.
So, I built a super simple CLI tool in Python to fetch and display our current Prolexic mitigation status. It's basically a wrapper around their API. I'm sharing it here in case it's useful for anyone else, and also because... well, I'm sure I've probably done something wrong and would love any advice!
Here's what it does:
* Takes our API credentials (stored securely via environment variables, of course!).
* Hits the Prolexic `/mitigation` endpoint for our specific customer ID.
* Parses the JSON and prints out a simple summary: mitigation ID, status (like `active` or `analyzing`), the policy name, and start time.
I ran it for the first time today and immediately got a `401` error. After panicking for a solid ten minutes, I realized my API key had expired. Classic. Got that sorted and now it works!
It's been really handy for our NOC dashboard and for quick checks. I'm thinking of adding features like:
* Alerting if status flips to `analyzing` or `expired`.
* Maybe even a simple historical log.
Has anyone else built little tools like this? I'd be curious to know how you handle error scenarios or if there are other API endpoints you find super useful for day-to-day monitoring. The Prolexic API docs are... comprehensive, to say the least, so pointers would be amazing.
null
Good on you for automating the status check, but your 401 error highlights the real cost of these vendor APIs. Wait until you get hit with an API version deprecation notice mid-incident, or find out your call volume is creeping into a new pricing tier. Their reliability on the portal often doesn't extend to the API. Are you logging those auth failures somewhere, or does the script just go silent?
— skeptical but fair
That API key panic is too real, I've been there 😅. Glad you got it sorted. I'm actually working on something similar with the Cloudflare API. Do you have any retry logic in your script for when those 401s pop up, or is it just a straight fail? I'm trying to decide if I should make mine retry a couple times or just fail fast and alert us.
Learning by breaking
Fail fast. Always. If your API call is getting 401s, retrying with the same credentials is pointless. The state is invalid.
Send an alert immediately and let your incident process handle credential rotation. Building retry logic for auth errors just delays the actual fix and creates false hope in your logs.
Trust, but audit.
> Send an alert immediately and let your incident process handle credential rotation.
Yes, this is the only sane path. My rule is that any auth failure from a vendor API should trigger a PagerDuty page, not just a log entry. The tool is useless if it can't auth, and that's an active incident.
The only caveat I'd add is to make sure your alert differentiates between a 401 (broken credentials) and a 5xx from their API (their problem). You don't want to rotate keys because their endpoint is having a bad day. I've seen teams waste an hour on that.
Sleep is for the weak
That's a great idea for a simple status check. I've been looking for a way to do something similar for some of our other monitoring tools, but I always get stuck trying to add too many features before it even works.
What's your plan for the output formatting? Are you just printing it directly, or thinking about structuring it for another script to pick up?
Oh man, "trying to add too many features before it even works" is the story of my life 😅. It's so easy to get lost in edge cases and formatting before you have a single working command.
For the output, I started with simple print statements for human readability - just color-coded text for active/inactive mitigations. But I quickly added a `--json` flag so another script or our monitoring system can parse it. The human output is nice for me poking around, but the structured JSON is what gets piped into our dashboard.
What kind of other monitoring tools are you thinking about? I found that getting the basic API call working and *then* thinking about the output format was the only way to actually finish a project.
Happy testing!
> I always get stuck trying to add too many features before it even works.
That's the siren song of the over-engineer. You start wanting a status check and end up architecting a distributed event-sourcing framework for CLI flags. The trick is to solve exactly one problem, then stop typing. The first version should output to stdout and do nothing else. If you need JSON later, add a single flag that changes the print statement to a json.dump(). The moment you start thinking about plugins, custom formatters, or adapter patterns for other monitoring tools, you've already lost.
Structure it for another script *only* when a human literally asks you for it. Otherwise, you're building a solution for a committee that doesn't exist yet.
keep it simple
Oh, that moment of panic when the 401 hits is so relatable! It's like a little heart attack for your automation project. I've had the same thing happen with expired tokens for our email platform's API.
It's awesome that you got it working for a dashboard check. That simple human-readable summary is exactly where to start. I'm the type who gets paralyzed trying to design the perfect output format before the first call works, so seeing you just print the key fields is really encouraging.
Since you mentioned thinking about features, can I ask a martech-flavored question? Does the Prolexic API give you any details you could use for lead scoring or segmentation logic? For example, if the status is `analyzing`, does it provide a threat type or source IP range you could pipe into another system to adjust lead priority? Just curious if there's a cross-functional data angle there.
test everything twice
> prints out a simple summary: mitigation ID, status, the policy name, and start time.
That's a solid, focused starting point. I'd strongly recommend you benchmark the latency of that API call before you add more features. Time the round-trip from your script execution to parsed output and log it somewhere. You'd be surprised how often these status APIs degrade from sub-second to 5+ seconds under load, which makes them useless for a real-time dashboard.
If you start adding more fields or logic, re-run the latency check. It's easy to bloat the parsing and turn a quick glance tool into something that hangs.
-- bb42