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The Newest of Newbies with Some Basic Questions on Pricing/Access Model

Karintha Marshall

Hi, hope all's well for everyone.

Looking to use some of the RE APIs for cyclical reporting (Power BI) and possibly data management (Power automate), but want to have a good understanding of how much data I need to be able to call in for the reports to perform consistently well. Questions are as follows:

A call is the retrieval of 1 instance for whichever API is being used? For instance, if I pull in 50 constituent records through the Constituent API, that's 50 successful calls. A list from the List API, 1 successful call, 20 gift records, 20 successful calls, etc etc. Am I understanding this properly?
If I publish a report in Power BI to other Pro users, and keep that report connected to one or several APIs as a data source, then when another Pro user refreshes that report, they will trigger another set of calls for all applicable API's right? I know this can be constrained with scheduled refreshes or static copies of data being connected to the report which may have to be the default if I'm understanding this correctly.
In Power Automate, each action performed after the trigger would be considered a call, is that correct? Example:
- An employee sends an email notification that a constituent has passed away. I set up a flow which will A) Mark a constituent Deceased, Populate a deceased date, and C-E) Populate three custom attributes on the constituent's record anytime this specific type of email is sent. In this example, I'm counting....6 actions/calls: 1 GET to retrieve constituent record, 4 POSTS to add the new attributes (just the field, not values for the fields) and the deceased date, and 1 PATCH to check off the deceased checkbox on Bio 1.
I was having a hard time finding any information on the rate limits and upgrade tiers. I found this blog post and where info from some of the links has since moved within the Basics of Getting Started. But when I go to My Subscriptions in my SKY Developer account:
- I don't see any info on the call increase tiers beyond my subscription, are the tiers in the above linked blog post the same today?
- When I click the Upgrade link I'm taken to an empty page
- When I click the URL to request an increase (i think the same page as Upgrade), taken to a blank page
- There's no clear indication who I should be contacting to ask about pricing for the upgrade tiers even if I did know this info. Do I go to my Customer Success rep and have them put me through to Sales/Professional Services? That seems a roundabout way since engineers for this feature are here in this forum. Building a thing and pricing it are two different matters though so maybe that's the route to take....Can a Blackbaud employee weigh in here?
- A day is constituted as midnight to 11:59 PM in whatever our local time zone is, is that correct?

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Ben Wong

Hi Karintha Marshall‍ ,

Welcome to the world of SKY Developer!

I want to share some documentation that should help you get started with the basic concepts that will serve you well on your journey.

The Basics page covers some of the basics of Rate limits and Quotas: https://developer.blackbaud.com/skyapi/docs/basics

We have some more "in-depth" documentation on API request throttling: https://developer.blackbaud.com/skyapi/docs/in-depth-topics/api-request-throttling

A successful API call made up of a request to an API endpoint and a corresponding response from that endpoint. For example, you may call the GET Constituent endpoint and receive a single constituent record back. That is one API call.

You may also call the GET Constituent list endpoint and receive up to 5000 constituent records back. That is still one API call.

As I've heard my friend Ben Lambert‍ say: in a restaurant, whether you order a single plate of wings, or a platter of wings, it is still a single order for the waiter to fetch.

The standard SKY API subscription has a quota limit of 25,000 API call per 24 hour period. This is mainly to protect our services from infinite loops from bad code and other potential abuse. The standard 25,000 quota limit is sufficient for the vast majority of customers. However, the limits need to be increased, you can use the increase request form to start the sales process:
https://developer.sky.blackbaud.com/usage-increase

You'll need to be logged in with your Blackbaud ID to see the form. You can also contact your Account Executive or Customer Success rep to request the increase.

As far as your specific questions about Power BI and Power Automate, Ben Lambert may be able to provide more insight there.

In case you didn't see the announcement, we recently published an open-source Power BI connector here with a video walkthrough: https://github.com/blackbaud/powerbi-connector

We also have a Microsoft Power Automate connector in the Blackbaud Marketplace. You can follow our setup guide to get started: https://docs.blackbaud.com/microsoft-connectors-docs/microsoft-power-platform/initial-setup-tutorial

Thanks!

Reuben Schmitz

I noted your response to a different question. We likewise have the Power BI connector installed - however, I am not seeing the Solicitor/Fundraiser datafields available for either Constituents or Actions - wondering if we missed something in the installation or if these endpoints are just not yet avaiable in this way. Any insight would be appreciated.