liquidware-ninjaSecond brain & toolkit
Personal project. Research and learning only. Not for production. No warranty.Not for production
  • Built on my own time for research and learning. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or supported by my employer, Liquidware or Microsoft.
  • Bring your own Liquidware licenses. Don't run any of it in production or against tenants and subscriptions that matter. Test in a dedicated lab first.
  • Provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, under each repository's license. You use it at your own risk and own the Azure charges it incurs.
  • Contributions and forks are welcome and encouraged on public repos. See Contribute.

Stratusphere API

partialReviewed 2026-10-28Source: stratusphere/api.md

The Stratusphere Hub serves a read-only data API for what Stratusphere collects. Whether it can change Hub settings is unverified. Every Hub serves its own full option reference, examples, and per-inspector column catalog at https://<hub>/lwl/api—a real Hub's built-in documentation always wins over anything recorded here.

Request shape and authentication

From Liquidware's Using the API and Accessing the API guides:

  • Endpoint: https://<hub>/lwl/api?json={...}, called with GET or POST.
  • Required fields: inspector (the data table ID) and basis (the group-by dimension, such as users returning user_id and user_name, or machines returning node_id and node_name). Without a time window, the default period is yesterday.
  • Authentication: Access is gated by a client IP allow list (Hub Administration > Configuration > Security Settings), optionally paired with HTTP Basic authentication as username@domain. The built-in ssadmin account cannot call the API; create a dedicated read-only API user (hub-setup.md).
  • Output formats: JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Inspectors and parameters seen in public samples

From Liquidware's public Stratusphere-UX SE PowerTools samples (reference only, no license; see community-projects.md) and SE Field Articles:

Inspector ID Dataset Typical basis Notes
0 Users / summary users, machines Overall user or machine summary metrics
1 Applications applications, users, machines Application load counts, load time, CPU/memory by process
2 Connections / remoting users, machines Session protocol and connection metrics
3 Virtualization hosts hosts Hypervisor / ESX host metrics
4 Machine inventory machines OS version, hardware make/model/type, CPU cores/speed, disk size, allocated memory, last boot
10 Login details users, machines Logon breakdown and timing

Common request parameters:

  • Time window: date (today, yesterday, 2 hours, 24 hours, 1 day), custom_start_date / custom_end_date (YYYY-MM-DD), start_time / end_time (hour integers, used for business-hour slicing), resolution (Day-Hour).
  • Projection and filtering: columns (array or comma-separated list of column names), filter (expressions such as app_load_count gt 0, user_name not like '...', d_id eq 5308 OR ...), only_process (user), node_group_name with unbasis.
  • Paging and formatting: limit (0 for all rows), sort_col, output (1 with output_name for background file generation), header, csv_eof.

Ecosystem and reporting patterns

  • Background generation for large queries: Large API responses are built asynchronously on the Hub. Liquidware's SE automation article retries after 30 seconds with a 180-second timeout.
  • Power BI integration: Liquidware's 2019 blog post points Power BI's Web connector directly at the Hub API URL, which requires an on-premises data gateway, a trusted Hub certificate, and the Hub remaining online for every refresh. Exporting to a normalized local dataset first (the pattern used by ux-assess, see spotcheck-and-sizing.md) avoids gateway and certificate dependencies and feeds Power BI the same pseudonymized dataset as written reports.
  • Built-in Executive Summary report: Stratusphere 6.7+ includes an Executive Summary UX custom report comparing KPIs across two time periods inside the Hub.

Gotchas

  • Self-signed TLS certificate: The Hub uses a self-signed certificate by default. Trust that certificate on the exporting machine instead of disabling TLS verification globally (Liquidware's older BatchReport.ps1 sample disables TLS checks).
  • Inspector Excel export row cap: Exporting an Inspector grid directly to Excel from the UI caps at 99,999 rows per sheet (unverified). Use the API with limit: 0 or slice by day/hour for larger estates.
  • Unverified column names and units: Until confirmed against a live Hub's /lwl/api page, exact column names for login duration and composite UX score, the units of memory_allocated and application_load_time_avg, and whether resolution: Day-Hour emits a clean timestamp column remain unverified.
  • PII in exports: Raw API responses contain real user and machine names. Keep raw exports in git-ignored output/ directories and pseudonymize with HMAC before data leaves the customer environment.
Linked from 5 pages