---
title: Introduction
slug: api
docTags: 
createdAt: 2025-07-17T09:16:39.525Z
---

The **Factry Historian API** gives developers direct programmatic access to data stored in Factry Historian. With it, you can query, retrieve, and interact with time-series data, events, the asset tree,... in a secure and structured way.

We provide a [OpenAPI (Swagger) specification](docId\:Qe3DSzUroDFWuVB3oFMMN), making it easy to explore available endpoints, understand request/response formats, and integrate Historian data into your own applications, dashboards, or analytics workflows.

Have a look at the [Python examples](docId\:LSpqIqL9j4kYFSa1NMf4A) to interact with the Factry Historian API using Python.

### OpenAPI validation layer

In Historian v8.2 we introduced a validation layer on top of the API that automatically validates all requests against our OpenAPI **specification**. This ensures all interactions with the API are as described in the spec. For this we rewrote large portions of the OpenAPI spec, making it more strict in certain places than before. This can cause certain legacy integrations to stop functioning if they depend on the more loose input validation performed before this update.

If you are encountering problems with the new validation layer, it can be disabled using the environment variable `OPENAPI_VALIDATION_ENABLED`. Setting this to `false` will disable the API validation layer, allowing the more loose legacy integrations. Do note that this opens up the Historian API to faulty data inputs which may result in unexpected behavior.