Hi everyone, I hope this is the right place for this. I’ve been quietly reading for a while, but this is my first real post, so please bear with me.
I’ve been tasked with looking into cloud security tools for our small business, and we’re currently evaluating Orca Security. Everyone talks about their agentless approach and the dashboard, which seems great, but I keep hitting a wall when I try to do anything programmatic. My background is more in the bookkeeping and operations side of SaaS tools, so maybe I’m just not looking in the right spot?
Specifically, I’ve been trying to use the API to pull some basic asset inventory data into our own internal reports. The documentation I’ve found feels… scattered? Like, some endpoints are documented in one portal, but then I find references to others only in old community posts. The examples often skip over the authentication setup, which I finally pieced together from three different pages. I spent a whole afternoon just trying to get a simple list of our cloud accounts to return correctly, and I’m still not sure I’m doing it the most efficient way.
I guess my question is: am I missing some central, well-maintained hub for their API docs? Or is the experience really this fragmented? Coming from tools like QuickBooks Online or Gusto, where the API documentation is very structured (even if it’s complex), I’m finding this surprisingly difficult to navigate. I really want to like Orca, but if this is a core part of their offering, it feels a bit discouraging.
Has anyone else gone through this and found a good workflow or a hidden gem of a resource? Any pointers would be so, so appreciated. I’m trying to build a solid case for our tooling stack, and thorough API support is becoming a bigger factor than I initially thought.
No, you're not missing anything. Their API docs are exactly that scattered. It's a classic vendor move: the dashboard is the shiny product for the execs who sign the checks, while the API is an afterthought for the engineers who actually have to live with it.
Pulling asset data was a headache for us too. We found the real 'documentation' was often in their support portal, buried in replies to tickets from two years ago. The official examples tend to assume you're already authenticated and have the perfect, non-rate-limited test environment.
If you're still evaluating, make this a contractual point. Get specific about which API endpoints you need documented and maintained. Otherwise, you'll be paying for a 'programmatic' interface that your team has to reverse-engineer.
— skeptical but fair