Google OS Config API
Browse all Google APIs41
AI ReadinessFoundational (D-)41/100
Official vendor OpenAPI document · agent-readyCloud InfrastructureComputeoauth217 EndpointsREST
For Agents
Manage VM patch deployments, OS policy assignments, and inventory across Google Cloud Compute Engine fleets.
Use for: Schedule a monthly patch deployment for production Linux VMs, Pause an in-flight OS policy rollout, List inventory of packages on a specific VM, Resume a previously paused patch deployment
Not supported: Does not provision VMs, run ad-hoc shell commands, or scan container images - use for declarative VM patching, OS policy assignment, and inventory only.
The OS Config API manages patch deployments, OS policy assignments, and inventory across Compute Engine VM fleets. It schedules patch jobs (with maintenance windows, reboot behaviour, and rollout strategies), declares desired OS state via OS Policies, and surfaces inventory and patch compliance per instance. Use it to keep Linux and Windows VM fleets compliant with security baselines and to drive scheduled patch rollouts. The spec exposes 17 endpoints.
Install Jentic One Beta
Connect the OS Config API to your agent
Jentic One is a self-hosted execution layer for AI agents. It lets your agent call the OS Config API, or any other public or private API you need. You set the rules, the agent never sees your credentials, and every call is logged.
Two steps, two machines. Install the instance in a safe environment, then register your agent from wherever it runs.
1
Step 1: Jentic One Host machine
# On the machine that will host your Jentic One instance:
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fgoogleapis.com%2Fosconfig" | sh2
Step 2: Agent machine
# On the machine where your agent runs (keep this separate from the instance):
curl -fsSL "https://jentic.com/install.sh?src=apis&api=%2Fapis%2Fgoogleapis.com%2Fosconfig" | sh
jentic register # connects your agent to your Jentic One instanceJentic One is in public beta. The setup above keeps your agent separate from the instance, which is what you want before using real credentials: an agent running as the same OS user as Jentic One can read its stored keys directly. Just evaluating? A single local install is fine to start. See the secure deployment guide for the tiers.
Capabilities
What an agent can do with OS Config API.
Schedule patch deployments with maintenance windows and reboot policies
Declare desired OS state via OS policy assignments and roll them out across zones
Pause and resume patch deployments and OS policy assignments mid-rollout
Read inventory of installed packages and detected vulnerabilities per VM
List revisions of an OS policy assignment to support rollback decisions
Cancel patch operations that are no longer wanted
Use Cases
Patterns agents use OS Config API for, with concrete tasks.
★ Scheduled patch rollouts with maintenance windows
Schedule patch deployments that target a labelled fleet of VMs, restrict execution to defined maintenance windows, and choose whether to reboot. The OS Config API lets platform teams roll patches out in waves - for example dev first, then prod - and pause if early indicators look bad. This replaces ad-hoc SSH-and-apt scripts with a managed rollout plane.
Create a patch deployment named monthly-linux-prod that targets instances with label tier=prod and runs the third Sunday of the month between 02:00 and 04:00 UTC.
Desired-state OS policy management
Declare OS policies that assert package presence, file content, and shell-script execution on Linux and Windows VMs, then bind them to zones and instance filters via os policy assignments. The API tracks revisions so you can roll back to the prior policy if a change breaks workloads. Useful for fleets that need configuration drift detection without a separate config-management tool.
Create an OS policy assignment that ensures the package fail2ban is present on all Linux VMs in zone europe-west1-b, then list revisions to confirm the rollout.
Inventory and compliance reporting
Pull VM inventory - installed packages, configured services, and detected vulnerabilities - to feed compliance dashboards or security review tooling. The OS Config API surfaces inventories per instance plus aggregate patch compliance views, so an automation can produce a compliance score across thousands of VMs without remote command execution.
List inventory for every VM in zone us-central1-a, write the package list per instance to a Cloud Storage bucket, and flag any instance reporting a CRITICAL vulnerability.
Agent-driven patch operations via Jentic
An ops agent reacting to a CVE can use Jentic to schedule a patch deployment that closes the gap and watch the rollout via the operations endpoint. Credentials stay in your Jentic One instance, so the agent runs under a scoped service-account token with audit trail. Useful for incident-response bots that need to mass-patch a fleet quickly.
Use Jentic to find the create-patch-deployment operation, load its schema, and schedule a one-off patch for tier=prod Linux VMs targeting CVE-2026-0001 within the next 4 hours.
Key Endpoints
17 endpoints — the os config api manages patch deployments, os policy assignments, and inventory across compute engine vm fleets.
METHOD
PATH
DESCRIPTION
POST
/v1/{+parent}/patchDeployments
Create a patch deployment
POST
/v1/{+name}:pause
Pause a patch deployment
POST
/v1/{+name}:resume
Resume a paused patch deployment
POST
/v1/{+parent}/osPolicyAssignments
Create an OS policy assignment
GET
/v1/{+name}:listRevisions
List OS policy assignment revisions
GET
/v1/{+parent}/inventories
List VM inventory
GET
/v1/{+parent}/instanceDetails
List per-instance compliance details
POST
/v1/{+parent}/patchDeployments
Create a patch deployment
POST
/v1/{+name}:pause
Pause a patch deployment
POST
/v1/{+name}:resume
Resume a paused patch deployment
POST
/v1/{+parent}/osPolicyAssignments
Create an OS policy assignment
GET
/v1/{+name}:listRevisions
List OS policy assignment revisions
GET
/v1/{+parent}/inventories
List VM inventory
GET
/v1/{+parent}/instanceDetails
List per-instance compliance details
Jentic AI Readiness Score
This API is usable in Jentic One now. Its AI-readiness score against Jentic's framework shows where it stands today and where improvements would make it even easier for agents to use.
O
OS Config API
- Foundational (D-)41/100
41
Foundational Compliance56
Developer Experience & Jentic Compatibility20
AI-Readiness & Agent Experience94
Agent Usability63
Security64
AI DiscoverabilityPowered by JenticScoring Framework 1.0.0 | Scoring Engine 0.4.0
Show dimension breakdown
41
Foundational Compliance
Base layer of spec validity and structural soundness.
Grade: D-Signals: 4
65%
Lint Results
Aggregated quality score from linter diagnostics, weighted by severity.
100%
Resolution Completeness
Percentage of `$ref` references that resolve successfully.
0%
Specification Validity
Checks whether the API description parses successfully and conforms to its declared specification (e.g., OpenAPI).
0%
Structural Integrity
Structural correctness score based on schema issues using logarithmic dampening.
56
Developer Experience & Jentic Compatibility
Clarity, completeness, and ingestion readiness for developers and tooling.
Grade: CSignals: 4
0%
Example Density
How richly the API is illustrated with examples.
100%
Example Validity
Percentage of examples that conform to their schemas.
25%
Response Coverage
Percentage of operations with complete response definitions (success, client error, server error).
100%
Tooling Readiness
Health of API ingestion, bundling, and resolution within Jentic pipelines.
20
AI-Readiness & Agent Experience
Semantic breadth, depth, and agent comprehension for AI systems.
Grade: FSignals: 4
82%
Description Coverage
Coverage of descriptions across API elements.
0%
Error Standardization
Coverage of RFC 9457 Problem Details for error responses.
0%
OperationId Quality
Coverage, uniqueness, and casing consistency of operationIds for AI inference.
0%
Summary Coverage
Coverage of summaries across operations/tags/info.
94
Agent Usability
Functional utility, complexity comfort, and AI orchestration readiness.
Grade: A+Signals: 1
94%
Complexity Comfort
Agent comfort level based on API operational and structural complexity.
63
Security
Trust, risk posture, and security compliance.
Grade: B-Signals: 1
62%
Authentication Strength
Average quality of security schemes based on authentication method strength (weakest link for OAuth2).
64
AI Discoverability
Findability, semantic richness, and reasoning readiness.
Grade: BSignals: 1
64%
Descriptive Richness
Clarity and depth of descriptions across API elements.
Score it yourself
Every API in the directory is allowlisted, so you can re-score it with no key required.
npx @jentic/api-scorecard-cli score <openapi-url>Why Jentic?
What agents get from Jentic-routed access to this vendor.
Setup
Wiring the OS Config API by hand means setting up Google OAuth 2.0 from a service account, minting scoped tokens, and managing patch-deployment and policy-assignment resource paths against osconfig.googleapis.com yourself. Through Jentic you install once, import the OS Config API from the API Directory, store the OAuth credential once, and your agent calls it.
Permission scoping
The OS Config API puts the resource in the URL path (/v1/{+parent}/patchDeployments, /v1/{+name}:pause), so a rule can pin your agent to one parent project: it can create patch deployments and read inventory there and nothing else. You choose the operations it may call, so you can allow pause and resume while leaving OS policy assignment out of the allowed set.
Credential isolation
Your Google OAuth credential for the OS Config API is stored once, encrypted, by your own Jentic One instance and injected at execution time. It never enters the agent's prompt, logs, or context.
Intent-based discovery
Agents search Jentic by intent such as 'schedule a patch deployment' or 'apply an OS policy', and Jentic returns the matching OS Config operation with its input schema so the agent calls the right endpoint without browsing the reference docs.
Related APIs
Alternatives and complements available in the Jentic catalogue.
FAQs
Specific to using OS Config API through Jentic.
What authentication does the OS Config API use?
The API uses Google OAuth 2.0 with the cloud-platform scope. Through Jentic, tokens are minted from a service account stored in your Jentic One instance so agents never see raw credentials.
Can I target VMs by label with patch deployments?
Yes. The patch deployment instanceFilter accepts label selectors and zone filters, so you can scope a deployment to tier=prod or env=staging across selected zones.
What are the rate limits for the OS Config API?
Google Cloud applies per-project quotas on patch and OS policy mutations. Treat large rollouts as long-running - patch jobs and OS policy assignments return operations that need polling rather than retry on failure.
How do I pause a patch deployment through Jentic?
Search Jentic for pause patch deployment, load the schema for POST /v1/{+name}:pause, and execute it with the deployment resource name. Resume later with the matching :resume call.
Does this API run arbitrary commands on a VM?
Only via OS policy resources of type ExecResource and only as part of a declared policy. Ad-hoc command execution belongs in different products (SSH, IAP) - this API is for declarative state and patch orchestration.
How do I check patch compliance for a project?
Call GET /v1/{+parent}/instanceDetails for an OS policy assignment to see per-instance compliance, or pull patchJob status for the latest patch deployment run to see fleet-level results.
Can I limit what my agent is allowed to do with the OS Config API?
Yes. Because you run Jentic One yourself, your own rules decide which OS Config operations and credentials the agent may use. Since the API carries the resource in the URL path (for example /v1/{+parent}/patchDeployments and /v1/{+name}:pause), you can pin the agent to a single parent project so it creates patch deployments and reads inventory there and nowhere else. You also pick the exact operations it can call, so you can allow pause and resume while leaving OS policy assignment creation out of the allowed set.
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