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Trusted Server Authentication

With Metric Insights Trusted Server Authentication, it is possible to allow users of an internal web application to login to Metric Insights automatically through a proxy URL. The primary purpose of this facility is to to integrate Metric Insights with an existing web application.

EXAMPLE

A common use case for this capability is if you have already developed an internal web portal for customers or employees. These customers and employees have already logged into your web portal, and you want those logged in users to automatically have access to Metric Insights as well.

1. Open Existing External Applications List

Access Admin > System > External Applications

  1. Click [+ New External Application] to access a pop-up.
  2. Name: Give the Application a descriptive name.
  3. [Save]

2. Complete Definition of the External Application

  1. External Application is: Make sure the Application is enabled.
  2. Allow Cross Domain Access:  Do not activate this checkbox unless you know you are going to be using the Metric Insights JavaScript API for low level access to charts and chart data.
  3. User Management Access: Activate this checkbox to integrate MI with LDAP to allow your application to add/modify MI users via API calls.
  4. [Save] the settings.
  5. Click [Show Credentials] to request MI to generate the Application Id and an Application key. Both values are needed when developing your portal.

3. Log in by proxy

Your web application will login to Metric Insights with the following steps:

  1. Using the MI username, and the  application id and application key obtained above, request an authentication token with an HTTPS POST to https://company.metricinsights.com/api/get_ticket. The required POST variables are 'user', 'application_id', and 'application_key'.
  2. Parse the returned json object: {'ticket':'<ticketValue>'}.
  3. Redirect the user to https://company.metricinsights.com/ticket/<ticketValue>/<RELATIVE_MI_URL> where RELATIVE_MI_URL is blank for the MI dashboard, or pointing to a specific MI Element.

3.1. Example proxy endpoint in PHP

For example, this proxy script could live under https://yourportal.com/mi.php and whenever you wanted to link to https://company.metricinsights.com/<RELATIVE_MI_URL>, you would instead send your users to https://yourportal.com/mi.php?url=RELATIVE_MI_URL. The sections in bold would need to be edited for your organization.

<?php
define('BASE_URL','https://company.metricinsights.com');
define('APPLICATION_ID','<external application id>');
define('APPLICATION_KEY','<external application key>');
$ch = curl_init(BASE_URL.'api/get_ticket');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, array('application_id'=>APPLICATION_ID,
            'application_key'=>APPLICATION_KEY,
      'user'=>'<the logged in user's MI username>'));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Accept: application/json'));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
$tmp = json_decode($response, true);
$ticket = $tmp['ticket'];
header('Location: '.BASE_URL.'ticket'.$ticket.'/'.(isset($_GET['url'])?$_GET['url']:''),true,302);
exit;