An “API client” in ActiveManage terminology is a registered external system that calls into the platform's API. Registering clients gives you visibility, observability, rate-limit isolation, and per-client revocation — all valuable when you have more than one integration.
What a Client Represents
- An external service that calls your API repeatedly (e.g. nightly Salesforce sync).
- A native app distributed to many devices (a mobile app's backend identity).
- A third-party integration that authenticates via OAuth.
- A development environment that needs sandboxed credentials.
Why Register Clients
- Observability: Per-client logs and usage charts.
- Per-client rate limits: Isolate spiky integrations from each other.
- Per-client scopes: Hard limit on what each integration can do.
- Revocation: Disable one integration without affecting others.
- Compliance: Demonstrate which systems were calling at audit time.
Worked Examples
- Salesforce client: Read+write on Customers, Orders. Rate limit 1000/min. Source IP locked to Salesforce egress range.
- Mobile app backend: Read+write on user-owned records. 10000/min rate limit. Identifies the mobile traffic separately from web.
- Third-party Slack bot: Read-only on notifications. OAuth-driven. Can be revoked by the user from their settings page.
- Internal data warehouse: Read-only across all datastores. Bulk endpoints allowed.