Introduction

Forcepoint NGFW Security Management Center (SMC) is part of the Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall (Forcepoint NGFW) solution. You can access the SMC in two ways: through the Management Client or through the SMC application programming interface (API).

This guide describes how to enable the SMC API and provides examples of its use. The target audience for this guide includes system administrators and developers.

Note: This guide does not provide detailed information about resources and actions in the SMC API. Detailed information about resources and actions is available in the automatically generated API documentation in the smc_api.zip file in the Documentation/SMC_API folder of the SMC installation files.

For detailed information about changes introduced since the previous version, see the automatically generated change log reports in the api_change_log.zip file in the Documentation/SMC_API folder of the SMC installation files.

The SMC API provides functions for adding, editing, and deleting elements in the Management Server database.

General use cases that are supported through the SMC API include the following:
  • Adding, editing, and removing simple elements (such as Hosts, Networks, and Address Ranges)
  • Adding, editing, and removing Access rules, NAT rules, and Inspection rules
  • Uploading a policy to an engine
  • Retrieving or changing the routing of an engine
  • Configuring VPNs

A Python-based library that provides basic functions for interacting with the SMC API is available. See https://⁠github.com/Forcepoint/fp-NGFW-SMC-python.

Although the SMC API follows the architectural style of RESTful web APIs, this guide introduces only the basic concepts. For more information, see https://⁠en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer and the linked content.