Migrated our app to SAML SSO. Now grant_type=password returns 401 on /api/v2/oauth/token. Need OAuth for the OTel exporter. Is there a programmatic flow that works with SAML enabled?
Yeah, that password grant is dead weight once you flip the SAML switch. The platform locks down basic auth for security, so you can’t just brute force a token with a username and password anymore. It’s a hard stop.
For an OTel exporter or any server-side script, you really want to use the Client Credentials flow. It’s cleaner because it doesn’t rely on a human user session expiring. You’ll need to register an API application in the Genesys Cloud admin console first. Go to Organization > API Applications and create a new one. Make sure you give it the right scopes for whatever metrics or logs you’re trying to pull. Usually analytics:call:center:read or similar, depending on what the exporter needs.
Once you have the Client ID and Client Secret, the curl command looks like this:
curl -X POST "https://api.mypurecloud.com/api/v2/oauth/token" \
-H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" \
-d "grant_type=client_credentials&client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&client_secret=YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET&scope=analytics:call:center:read"
The response will give you an access token and a refresh token. Since you’re running this in a DevOps pipeline or a sidecar container, you can cache that token until it expires. The tokens usually last an hour, so just handle the refresh logic in your exporter config.
If you absolutely must use a user context (maybe the exporter needs to act on behalf of a specific agent to see their personal stats), then you’d look at the Authorization Code flow with PKCE. But that requires a browser redirect, which is a pain to automate for a background service. Stick to Client Credentials if you can. It’s the standard way to handle non-human auth now.
Just double-check your network egress rules too. Sometimes corporate firewalls block the initial token request if it’s coming from a new IP range. You’ll get a 401 or a timeout if that’s the case. Worth a look if the curl works from your laptop but fails from the server.