I'm Caly Heasman, Developer Advocacy Director
here at Docusign.
And today, we're talking about the new Docusign Monitor API.
So today, I'm chatting with Nick West,
Lead Engineer on the new Docusign Monitor API.
Nick, welcome.
Hi, Caly.
Great to be here.
I'm excited to have you here, because Docusign Monitor
is something that I have been really looking forward
to talking about.
It's something totally new, an API departure for us.
It's not just a new feature on e-sign.
I think a lot of users from a whole bunch of different,
backgrounds, from security and IT and developers,
are going to be really excited about using this.
So let's get into it.
Can you tell us a little bit about what Monitor is?
Sure.
One of Docusign's top priorities is our customer security.
Docusign Monitor helps protect against insider and outsider
threats.
It does this by a rules-based system
that looks for anomalous behavior
and other various machine learning techniques that
are continually watching your user behavior event stream,
and just looking for unusual things.
Can you tell us a little bit about the kinds of insights
that customers can get out of this?
Sure.
Customers can get real-time alerts
for suspicious or unusual usage.
Or additionally, the monitor dashboard, our UI,
allows customers to search around in their data,
looking for additional insights.
Sure.
Let's talk about that.
How would we go about pulling this data out
of the Docusign systems?
How do the customers get this?
Great question.
The API itself is actually pretty simple.
It's a single get endpoint.
And there's only one endpoint involved,
because it's not actually terribly complicated.
You're effectively saying hey, I'm this organization,
and here are all my credentials.
And it just gives you, starts giving you the data back.
And from there, you can either put it
into basically any modern database--
because it's just json blobs-- or it
works quite well in Splunk.
Very cool.
So I've got my streaming API endpoint.
And it sounds like, you talk about Docusign
has the UI that's available for you to use.
But you can also put this into Splunk or somewhere else.
Can you sort of walk us through that?
Maybe show us the UI, and how we might take a look at the data?
Yeah, sure.
Let me show you the UI first, to set a little context.
And then we can go ahead and talk about the API
itself in action.
The UI itself has summary statistics for envelope's
that have been sent recently.
And it'll also show you a really cool world map of where
these events are happening.
It makes it easier to understand if things are happening
in places they shouldn't be.
And beyond that, you can see your alerts
that are enabled through your product,
and how they're configured, and what alerts have been
executing or fired recently.
Are there any other types of alerts
that we can look at here?
Yeah, another alert that's pretty interesting
is when someone disables recipient authentication
on an envelope.
That's the sort of thing that, generally speaking,
accounts don't lower the security level
of certain settings.
And so when that happens--
and specifically, in this case, when recipient authentication
is disabled-- we actually trigger an alert that's
presented to the administrator.
So they have more visibility into what is actually
happening in the system.
And so there are several classes of alerts like that around when
password strength is reduced, or other things like that,
are sort of dialed back, that we try
to bring it to people's attention
that this is generally not something that is done lightly.
And so everyone needs to be aware that it's happening.
And Nick, can you maybe show me an example
of how I would use the API, just to get the raw data itself?
Sure, I'd love to.
It's actually not too complicated.
So this isn't an API that you should be intimidated about.
The API itself, the parts that are happening here is,
we effectively go out.
We authenticate and get a JWT token.
And then we request our data with this JWT token.
The data we get back after a request
is a result object that contains a cursor that
points to the next part of the data stream,
to get our next batch of data.
Because we can't pull it all at once.
But we can pull chunks very quickly.
And then the actual data itself--
and if you look through the event here that's downloaded,
it's basically the timestamp, an event ID,
and a whole bunch of other metadata,
and the actual event itself, of what happened.
And an event basically corresponds
to a user performing some sort of action--
either via our UI or our API, or things like that.
How do I actually do this?
I'll bet that's pretty simple, too.
Yeah, this example is actually up on dev center right now.
So one last question I have is, if I do want to use this,
and I want to start playing around,
is there any type of Docusign account
that I need in order to be able to take advantage?
You just need to have an account that
is a member of an organization.
Once you have the Docusign Monitor entitlement,
you can go ahead and download the data.
All right.
Thanks so much, Nick, for being here.
Thanks, Caly.
It was great.
And for the developers who want to try this out,
the new Docusign Monitor API is available now.
And there's documentation and examples
on our developer center.
And Nick, to close out, any new releases planned?
Yes, we've got configurable alerts coming, as well as
additional alerts.
Very cool.
Looking forward to that.
All right.
Thanks, Nick, and we'll see you all at the next developer
deep dive.
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