Overview of management and APIs

Applies to:

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Defender for Endpoint supports a wide variety of options to ensure that customers can easily adopt the platform.

Acknowledging that customer environments and structures can vary, Defender for Endpoint was created with flexibility and granular control to fit varying customer requirements.

Endpoint onboarding and portal access

Device onboarding is fully integrated into Microsoft Configuration Manager and Microsoft Intune for client devices and Microsoft Defender for server devices, providing complete end-to-end experience of configuration, deployment, and monitoring. In addition, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint supports Group Policy and other third-party tools used for devices management.

Defender for Endpoint provides fine-grained control over what users with access to the portal can see and do through the flexibility of role-based access control (RBAC). The RBAC model supports all flavors of security teams structure:

  • Globally distributed organizations and security teams
  • Tiered model security operations teams
  • Fully segregated divisions with single centralized global security operations teams

Available APIs

The Microsoft Defender for Endpoint solution is built on top of an integration-ready platform.

Defender for Endpoint exposes much of its data and actions through a set of programmatic APIs. Those APIs will enable you to automate workflows and innovate based on Defender for Endpoint capabilities.

The available API and integration in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

The Defender for Endpoint APIs can be grouped into three:

  • Microsoft Defender for Endpoint APIs
  • Raw data streaming API
  • SIEM integration

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint APIs

Defender for Endpoint offers a layered API model exposing data and capabilities in a structured, clear, and easy to use model, exposed through a standard Azure AD-based authentication and authorization model allowing access in context of users or SaaS applications. The API model was designed to expose entities and capabilities in a consistent form.

Watch this video for a quick overview of Defender for Endpoint's APIs.

The Investigation API exposes the richness of Defender for Endpoint - exposing calculated or 'profiled' entities (for example, device, user, and file) and discrete events (for example, process creation and file creation) which typically describes a behavior related to an entity, enabling access to data via investigation interfaces allowing a query-based access to data. For more information, see Supported APIs.

The Response API exposes the ability to take actions in the service and on devices, enabling customers to ingest indicators, manage settings, alert status, as well as take response actions on devices programmatically such as isolate devices from the network, quarantine files, and others.

Raw data streaming API

Defender for Endpoint raw data streaming API provides the ability for customers to ship real-time events and alerts from their instances as they occur within a single data stream, providing a low latency, high throughput delivery mechanism.

The Defender for Endpoint event information is pushed directly to Azure storage for long-term data retention, or to Azure Event Hubs for consumption by visualization services or additional data processing engines.

For more information, see Raw data streaming API.

The new Microsoft Defender XDR Streaming API includes email and alert events in addition to device events. For more information, see Microsoft Defender XDR Streaming API.

SIEM API

When you enable security information and event management (SIEM) integration, it allows you to pull detections from Microsoft Defender XDR using your SIEM solution or by connecting directly to the detections REST API. This activates the SIEM connector access details section with pre-populated values and an application is created under your Microsoft Entra tenant.

Tip

Do you want to learn more? Engage with the Microsoft Security community in our Tech Community: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Tech Community.