Hey folks! 👋 I've been deep in Lacework for about six months now, mostly loving the visibility it gives us into our cloud environments. That dashboard truly is a thing of beauty—colorful, intuitive, and the way it visualizes resource relationships and alerts is honestly top-tier. I find myself showing it off in demos!
But... I've hit a bit of a wall as we try to automate things and integrate it into our broader security and DevOps workflows. The API just doesn't feel like it lives in the same world. It's giving me strong "tacked on later" vibes, and it's becoming a real friction point.
Here’s my breakdown of where it stumbles:
* **Inconsistency is the big one.** The data models and field names sometimes don't match what you see in the dashboard. I'll get a beautifully formatted alert in the UI, but when I fetch it via API, I'm playing a guessing game with nested JSON to find the equivalent piece of info.
* **Pagination and filtering can be clunky.** Trying to pull historical data or run specific queries feels much more limited than the free-form exploration the dashboard allows. I often have to make multiple calls and stitch data together myself.
* **Rate limiting feels a bit strict** for what we want to do (like syncing alert data to our internal ticketing system). We've had to build in some pretty aggressive backoff logic, which slows everything down.
For example, we wanted to automatically generate a weekly report of all high-severity cloud activity trends. Simple in the UI—just apply the filters and look. Building the same via the API was a multi-day puzzle of sorting through documentation and trial-and-error.
Has anyone else run into this? I'm curious:
- What workarounds or wrapper scripts have you built to make the API more usable?
- Are there specific endpoints you've found to be more reliable than others?
- For those who've also used tools like Wiz or Palo Alto Prisma Cloud, how do their APIs compare in terms of parity with the dashboard?
I really want to love Lacework end-to-end, but this gap between the fantastic front-end and the underwhelming API is holding us back from full automation bliss.
Happy comparing
Oh man, the inconsistency part resonates. We ran into that exact thing trying to automate some compliance reporting. The UI showed a clean, friendly rule name, but the API returned some internal ID. Had to build a separate lookup table just to map them, which felt like a workaround for something that should just... work.
It gets extra fun when you're trying to script something and the pagination just stops giving you a 'next' token without warning. Had to add some janky loop logic with a max retry. Makes you appreciate when a service designs the API as a first-class citizen from the start.
Have you found any decent patterns for stitching the data together, or are you just writing a lot of custom glue code?
Right-size everything
That pagination issue sounds rough. I haven't automated much with the API yet, mostly using the dashboard for alerts.
When you say the filtering feels limited, do you mean for the alert data specifically? I was hoping to set up some basic external reporting soon, but maybe I should temper my expectations.
What's the best resource you've found for working around the API limits?