Unlocking Real-Time Pipeline Insights with the Bullhorn Web Open API - Virtual Brew 12/04/25

Want real-time visibility into your pipeline’s health without switching systems?

Listen as remote monitoring expert Cole Finney explains how the Bullhorn Web Open API connects your RMU data directly to the tools you already use — Power BI, GIS, Maximo, and more.

You’ll learn how to:

• Integrate Bullhorn data into existing toolsets
• Eliminate manual handling and reporting delays
• Build flexible dashboards that deliver instant insights

And be sure to register for future Virtual Brews!

Transcript

Introduction

Justin
Good morning, everyone — I’m really glad everyone’s here with us today. For those of you who made it to our annual Users Group event at the beginning of November, we definitely appreciate you, it was great catching up with everyone. Welcome to Virtual Brew — today we’re going to be talking about some of our integrated data through our open API system with our Bullhorn Web system. I’m going to pass this over to Cole Finney, our product manager for the remote monitoring section. Cole, over to you.

Introduction to the Bullhorn Open API

Cole Finney
Thank you for handing it over, Justin. Before I get going, I want to share a poll — I dropped it in the chat. We’re going to be talking a lot about the Bullhorn open API today. If you’re familiar with the Bullhorn remote monitoring space, or other remote monitors in the corrosion world, you’ve probably heard about an API, or ways to securely transfer data outside of a web system or portal. I dropped a poll in the chat just to get a pulse on how familiar you all are with APIs in general, so I can tailor the content a bit — and feel free to put any questions in the chat as we go, I’m happy to answer them along the way or at the end.

Here’s what we’ll cover: what APIs are in general, and an overview of the Bullhorn open API; some capabilities tied to it and what you can actually do with it; what’s unlocked for you using Bullhorn remote monitors and this new API, and how to access it — what credentials and account type you need; and a bit of a demo of some of the capabilities you and your team can implement with the API.

What Is an API?

So, what is an API? Looking at the poll, there’s a mix — some of you are somewhat familiar, and a few of you are saying, “what in the world is this acronym?” In a nutshell, an API — application programming interface — is really a superhighway for accessing data from one place to another.

As an analogy: think of a restaurant. You’ve got your kitchen — that’s where the food is made, where your cooks are, where the ingredients are. In the sense of data transfer, that’s your core systems, your servers, where your data lives in a warehouse or database. Then, to get that food, or that data, from the kitchen to the people using it, you’ve got a waiter or waitress — think of the API as that waiter. You tell the API what you want — what data you want to show in a dashboard, what you want to integrate with a work order system, a risk model, or another internal database — the API takes that order to the back, pulls the data, and brings it back to you the way you wanted it, like a nicely made meal.

How It Works

In real-world terms: you’ve got your kitchen on the left, which is Bullhorn Web — that’s where all your data lives. Whenever you have remote monitors — volts, amps, AC current density if you’re using AC monitors — Bullhorn Web today hosts 18 months of data on the site, including all the cold storage data. That’s where all your database materials and information live. Through the open API, we’ve created a kind of superhighway — for those of you into Star Wars or sci-fi, think of it like a hyperspace lane, but for data transfer.

Once the open API is connected to your external systems — Power BI, Maximo, any third-party dashboard you use — I’ll also show it hooked up to a demo application, and for those of you using PCS, this is also tied into PCS 2.5. Once that integration is done, your data can flow through that superhighway, from Bullhorn Web into your third-party system, PCS, or any other tool, streaming in real time.

Background: The PCS 2.5 Integration

I mentioned PCS — around this time last year, we released PCS version 2.5, and one of the biggest things in that release was integrating Bullhorn Web data into PCS without needing the original bridge. We did that through a true API integration — the first API-format integration between Bullhorn and PCS. It’s a one-time setup, one integration per PCS database, but you can integrate multiple client IDs from Bullhorn Web through that API into a single PCS database.

What was valuable about this was a much more real-time or scheduled transfer of data from Bullhorn Web into PCS, more automatic and less prone to errors you might not catch — unlike the bridge, where you might have had to make a change in each individual bridge before a transfer, and if you missed that, or someone made a change without telling you and it failed, you might not have known. This API has been out for over a year now, and we have a lot of users on it — I’d be curious to hear in the chat if you’re using PCS 2.5 today, and what your experience has been, since over the last year it’s proven to be a reliable integration.

Expanded Access: Now Available for All Third-Party Systems

Now that we’ve seen it proven and reliable in PCS, we’ve expanded this to be available for all third-party systems — not just PCS. You can now access Bullhorn RMU data in any platform, at any time. This is available now, and I’ll show you how to get to it in Bullhorn Web later — we’re excited to say this was announced and released a few weeks ago at our AI World Users Group event, and it’s readily available and accessible right now in Bullhorn Web.

Capabilities: Third-Party Dashboards

So what does this actually mean for you? With programming, endpoint mapping, and extra fields, the sky is really the limit on integration capabilities with your Bullhorn RMU data — the ability to expand your integration into any tool is massively improved.

A common one today is third-party dashboards. For those of you with multiple RMU vendors wanting to see all your data in one place, managing multiple systems, or building a compliance or corrosion management dashboard in Power BI or another visualization tool — using this API, you can import all that data from Bullhorn Web into a visual space that also takes in other forms of data, to tell the full story of your corrosion program and maintenance systems.

Capabilities: Maintenance Systems

For those of you using Maximo, SAP, or other maintenance tools — a lot of users are taking voltage measurements, and say you get a low voltage reading or an alarm packet. With this integration, you can go into Maximo or your work order and maintenance system and schedule a work order directly: “go check out this asset, something’s going on out there.” This is all done through programming — if you’re not super technically savvy, I’m not either, I need some help setting up an API or a tool like this, but with some assistance from your internal IT team, you can integrate this data into any of your internal systems.

Capabilities: GIS Integration

Another common one is GIS integration. For those of you visualizing your data spatially, integrating your remote monitoring data into your infrastructure mapping or other GIS systems is another valuable way to expand your view of your CP system and your whole compliance picture, alongside data coming in from PCS and other tools feeding into GIS.

Capabilities: Risk Models

Risk models are another important one. Remote monitors are a key tool for analyzing and troubleshooting your CP system and pipeline infrastructure as a whole, and determining where an area might need to be addressed early, especially with regulation changes — proactive maintenance and proactive identification of areas to maintain. Being able to add insights into your risk model from remote monitors that are capturing measurements once a week, or every 15 minutes on the AC side, helps you make better decisions on where to make proactive changes. This wasn’t really possible before with Bullhorn Web — now it’s an easy, instantaneous way to get that data into your risk model.

Capabilities: Internal Systems and Machine Learning

There are really endless possibilities beyond what I’ve covered — not just external systems and databases, but internal ones too. If you’re using SQL or other internal tools to manage your compliance system, this is an easy way to connect to internal systems like work order management tools or other databases, to help maintain and keep a clean look at your compliance system, using the data you’re capturing every day and every week from your remote monitors.

And for those of you who’ve dabbled in machine learning — the amount of data captured by remote monitors is a fantastic resource. If you’re using risk models with predictive analysis, integrating the vast pool of data your remote monitors are capturing gives your risk model and machine learning models an ample amount of data to make better decisions, and leads to better decisions across the board.

Automated, Real-Time Data Handling

This API lets you access your data anywhere, at any time — not just in Bullhorn Web, or your SQL database, or your dashboard, but anywhere any platform that can consume an API. What’s really valuable about an API, unlike a scheduled job service or scheduled export from Bullhorn Web today, is that it’s always connected — through programming and integration with whatever tool you’re plugging it into, you get your data in real time, unlike a scheduled export to an Excel table, which is how extracts from Bullhorn Web often work today. This lets you automate your reporting — you don’t have to wake up and push a button to get data into your internal report, you can automate it.

What’s also great about an API is there’s ample documentation once you’re in Bullhorn Web with the right credentials to see how to implement it. An API is incredibly configurable — we’ve given you the tools to configure this data transfer to tailor it exactly to how your systems and SOPs work.

Q&A: APIs and Risk-Based Integration

William
Could you mention something about the benefits of APIs for risk-based integration or corrosion control?

Cole Finney
Really good question. When you’re using APIs for risk-based integration, that real-time, automated access to data from any system — in this case, all your remote monitors — gets you more real-time data: remote monitoring data, compliance data, troubleshooting data your teams are running, all of which is very valuable for a risk-based system. It’s not just what’s going on right now, but the legacy history of an asset — if you’ve had a remote monitor there for five years, you now have five years of true, every-week or every-day data, outside of just your compliance data, that can tell your risk model a story you couldn’t tell before, at least not without a lot of manual interaction and manual data pulling. Having that real-time integration helps your team make a lot better decisions.

Justin
Yeah, and Willie, maybe just to expand on that a little — a lot of risk systems use probabilistic risk modeling: if you maintain a certain operational profile at a certain time, you’ll have a potential event, and Bullhorn data and the things coming in speak to the health of the pipeline system. So you can use that in probabilistic risk modeling and risk models in general, to build predictive analytics — a lot of customers use this data for that. Hope that makes some sense.

Cole Finney
Awesome, yeah, perfect — we’ll definitely talk with you after the session here, William, and would love to dig into that more.

Security and One-Way Data Integration

Getting into a few more items tied to this API — you’ve heard me say “additional value” a lot, probably more times than I can count, so if anyone can tell me how many times in the chat, I’ll send you a Virtual Brew mug.

This API is an easy, one-way data integration platform, and it’s very secure — we built it using the OpenAPI spec, and it’s SOC 2 accredited, encrypted end-to-end, both at rest and in transit. If you tell your IT team all of that, their eyes are going to light up — we took security and easy integration very seriously with this API, to make sure the data you want out of Bullhorn Web can go into any system easily and securely, with meaningful endpoints. Endpoints are basically the data itself — readings, units, and so on. This lets you link multiple accounts together, securely, in an easy, one-way integration.

When I say one-way, that means data flows from Bullhorn Web to your external system, not the other way around.

Accessing the API

Accessing the API is very simple. In Bullhorn Web — here’s a screenshot on the right — the requirement is that you have a Bullhorn account with client admin access. We have various security levels of access in Bullhorn Web, and to access the API and create new keys to integrate data into other systems, you need to be a client admin. We wanted to make sure the right people are managing this integration, since your API keys — I’ll show you in a minute — are essentially your username and password. If you handed your username and password out to everyone who wanted access, that wouldn’t go well for you or your IT team, so we made sure only the right people can access this data and these credentials.

Once you’re in Bullhorn Web, you’ll click the Admin tab up top, and you’ll see a button that says Bullhorn API — clicking that takes you to a screen to set up your API credentials. I’ve got an example here that we made back in May. You’ll click Add New Credential, which creates a new username-and-password-style credential for accessing your API, and from there, you have access to a way to pull data from the API.

Live Demo: Bullhorn Web API Setup

Now let’s actually see it in action. I’m going to use a demo app we built at American Innovations, mainly as a visual aid for showing the capabilities you have as a user with the Bullhorn Web API — this helps both technical and non-technical folks like myself get more hands-on with the endpoints, what the data actually looks like, and how to tailor it to your own production database or dashboard.

We built it using the OpenAPI spec — for those of you who are technical, there are platforms like GitHub with generators for working with an OpenAPI spec. For those of you who aren’t, like me, this is great, because since we used this open spec, there are a lot of secure, open-source tools out there that let you plug in an API credential and build a dashboard or tool to interpret the API, without needing to be a developer.

Let me start sharing my screen and hop over to Bullhorn Web to show our demo dashboard — this demo is available on GitHub, and if you’re interested in integrating or looking into it, we’ll share the link after the presentation.

So, I’m in our field test client here, with all of my Bullhorn remote monitors. I’ll go to Admin and click Bullhorn API — since I have client admin access on this account, I can go create a credential for the open API. I’m going to go to the login screen for our API demo app — I already have a credential created, so I’ll use this one. You’ll have a client ID and a client secret — think of this as your username and password. Copy and paste your client ID and client secret in, and sign in.

Live Demo: Dashboard Walkthrough

Now that I’ve signed in, my demo dashboard is building. This is a visualized tool that lets you look at unit data and different data streams coming in from the API. For the sake of time, I’ll be quick here — I’ll skip to the Readings tab, which looks at the readings endpoint. Whenever you capture measurements on your remote monitors, this dashboard gives you a look at all the different types of records captured, with filters — only show records with alarms, only show specific facility types, like rectifiers, AC monitors, or test stations.

We’ve added a bunch of different ways to visualize the data captured and streamed through the API. This activity dashboard is a look at the month of November, showing a heat map of which days I received the most measurements — if I was expecting measurements on a certain day, I’d see something like Friday, November 15th, where I only got 8 readings, versus two weeks later when I got 32. Maybe there was a pipeline outage, maybe power went out — something worth investigating in more depth.
There’s also a location heat map showing where your units are and where readings are coming from — valuable for those using Power BI or other dashboards to show where all your units are located.

Another important view is the actual readings and measurements — here I’ve got several AC monitors and rectifier monitors on the dashboard. We can map out, for an AC monitor as an example, AC amps, coupon pipe-to-soil, AC current density, DC current density, AC volts, and various other measurement types captured across all the different remote monitor types, laid out on a graph from November through December 1st. This is incredibly valuable not just for a point-in-time look at your pipeline system, but for seeing trends — where are things going, where am I seeing spikes in measurements, voltage, or current, and what do I need to address.

There are also various data packet streams, like the ability to see when units were changed — change logs, for those who need to track when units were modified. In this case, I don’t have any changes in this account since we haven’t changed any settings, but this shows you that no one went in and changed your units, GPS coordinates, or permissions — really important for IT, system admins, or corrosion managers tracking that kind of thing.

Closing Q&A and Support

That’s a quick look at the dashboard. Like I said, the API is available now — once you’re back in Bullhorn Web with credentials, you’ll find a Redoc page and Swagger documentation to help implement the API. For those of you who aren’t technical, don’t worry, I don’t read those either, but if you send them to your IT team, they’ll be able to translate exactly what that means and help get you squared away.

I know we’re right at time, but thanks again, everybody, for coming to this Virtual Brew — does anyone have any additional questions in the chat, or for us? If you’d rather not ask here, we can always follow up after the webinar.

Justin
Just a quick follow-up — this did go live as one of the features and capabilities we released during our Users Group conference. If there’s anyone in the room — I know, Carlos, you’d asked some questions here about the integration and the process — please always remember to reach out to our support team. You have a direct call-in number, and our support ticketing system is at support.aiworldwide.com. They can definitely start working with you on the integration side. We have a lot of content coming, videos and walkthroughs for these integration steps, and we’ll make sure links go out through our distribution channels — please don’t hesitate to ask us for support, our job is to get your data where it needs to be, seamlessly, and this is another step in the right direction as we move to be more API-centric.

If there are no more questions, I want to wish everyone a great holiday season — this is our last Virtual Brew for ’25, so a great big hooray for us, and thank you, Cole, for the time today and covering this hot topic of APIs. We’ll see you all in 2026 at our January Virtual Brew. Thanks, everyone, hope you have a great close to the rest of the season.

Cole Finney
All right, thank you all — have a great rest of your day and holiday season.