NS1

NS1 (now IBM NS1 Connect) is a managed authoritative DNS, traffic management, and DDI platform. Its data-driven DNS steers traffic with real-time telemetry (Pulsar RUM), health-check monitoring, filter-chain traffic-steering policies, GeoDNS, and dedicated DNS. Everything is programmable through the NS1 REST API at api.nsone.net/v1, authenticated with an X-NSONE-Key API key, and supported by first-party SDKs (Python, Go, JavaScript, PHP), an Ansible module set, a Terraform provider, and a command-line interface. NS1 was acquired by IBM in 2022 and is delivered as IBM NS1 Connect; the api.nsone.net API host and v1 contract remain unchanged.

NS1 is listed with 1 API on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Company, Networking, DNS, Managed DNS, and Traffic Management.

NS1’s developer surface includes documentation, API reference, authentication, CLI, and 13 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Profile data on GitHub

23.6/100 emerging ▬ flat Agent 18/100 agent aware Front door AI 3/6 light library Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-10-17 · rubric v0.24.0

1 API

Company Networking DNSManaged DNSTraffic Management DDI Infrastructure

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-10-17 · rubric v0.24.0

Composite quality — 23.6/100 · emerging

Contract Quality 5.1 / 21

Developer Ergonomics 8.9 / 17

Access Clarity 0.0 / 17

Operational Transparency 0.3 / 11

Contract Governance 0.0 / 10

Discoverability 6.2 / 9

Regulatory Posture 1.8 / 15

Agent readiness — 18/100 · agent aware

Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 8 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Horizontal (data, software, accessibility, platform) regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics could not be measured. We hold no machine-readable contract for this provider to read, so there is nothing to measure a write surface against. Excluded rather than scored zero: never-measured and measured-empty are different facts. Publishing an OpenAPI is what makes this facet — and several others — scorable at all.

The six quality facets above are damped to 85 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 15. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 85% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/ns1: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Markets this provider is in provisional

The Kin Score Market layer reads a provider inside its market: its position, and how deep its integrations go. Depth is only comparable within a position. Provisional and unweighted: not part of the Kin Score or agent readiness.

Market	Position	Depth	Registered MCP server	Declares compatibility
Domains and DNS (registrars, registries, DNS)	builds-on	34.5 (thin)	-	-

Registered MCP server and declares compatibility are report only — not weighted. Undeclared means we found nothing we can read, so there is no number: we never infer integrations.

Standards implemented 1

Standards this provider implements or carries. De facto ones are profiled and measured by the API Commons; formal ones come from the standards directory and are linked by the provider's own tags. The evidence column says how each claim was established — not that it was made.

DNS

tagged — the provider's own APIs.json carries the standard as a tag; implementation not verified

APIs 1

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

NS1 Connect API

REST/JSON API for managing NS1 (IBM NS1 Connect) authoritative DNS: zones, records, answers and filter chains, monitoring jobs, notification lists, data sources and feeds, accou...

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Ns1 Authentication

apiKey · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Ns1 Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC

SECURITY

Resources

Get Started 1

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

DeveloperPortal

DeveloperPortal

Documentation 2

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Documentation

Documentation

APIReference

APIReference

Agent Surfaces 2

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

WellKnown

WellKnown

LLMsTxt

LLMsTxt

Design & Contract 3

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Conventions

Conventions

ErrorCatalog

ErrorCatalog

Lifecycle

Lifecycle

Build 4

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

GitHubOrganization

Packages

SDKs

CLI

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

DomainSecurity

DomainSecurity

Authentication

Authentication

Company 1

The organization behind the API

Website

Website

Other 2

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

ParentCompany

ParentCompany

Protobuf

Protobuf

Source (apis.yml)

aid: ns1
name: NS1
description: NS1 (now IBM NS1 Connect) is a managed authoritative DNS, traffic management, and DDI platform. Its data-driven
  DNS steers traffic with real-time telemetry (Pulsar RUM), health-check monitoring, filter-chain traffic-steering policies,
  GeoDNS, and dedicated DNS. Everything is programmable through the NS1 REST API at api.nsone.net/v1, authenticated with an
  X-NSONE-Key API key, and supported by first-party SDKs (Python, Go, JavaScript, PHP), an Ansible module set, a Terraform
  provider, and a command-line interface. NS1 was acquired by IBM in 2022 and is delivered as IBM NS1 Connect; the api.nsone.net
  API host and v1 contract remain unchanged.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/ns1/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- ggv-capital
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: portfolio-lead
deliveryModel:
  model: library
  open_source: false
  commercial: false
  callable_host: false
  label: Library · distributed through package registries, no callable service
  confidence: low
  source:
  - none
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source:
  - authentication
  - security
  - url: https://ns1.com/
    status: 301
    note: declared website redirects to https://www.ibm.com/products/ns1-connect — a different registrable domain (ns1.com
      -> ibm.com), possible rename or acquisition (probed 2026-09-03, roadmap#169)
  generated: '2026-09-03'
  method: derived
specificationVersion: '0.23'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-20'
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-20'
  status: enriched
  artifacts_added: 10
  pass: local-v1
image: https://github.com/ns1.png
tags:
- Company
- Networking
- DNS
- Managed DNS
- Traffic Management
- DDI
- Infrastructure
tags_raw:
- Company
- Networking
- DNS
- Managed DNS
- Traffic Management
- DDI
- API
- Infrastructure
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
apis:
- name: NS1 Connect API
  description: 'REST/JSON API for managing NS1 (IBM NS1 Connect) authoritative DNS: zones, records, answers and filter chains,
    monitoring jobs, notification lists, data sources and feeds, account/team/user/API-key management, usage stats, and Pulsar
    traffic-steering data. Authenticated with the X-NSONE-Key header.'
  humanURL: https://ns1.com/api
  baseURL: https://api.nsone.net/v1/
  properties:
  - type: Authentication
    url: authentication/ns1-authentication.yml
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://developer.ibm.com/apis/catalog/ns1--ibm-ns1-connect-api/Introduction
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ns1-connect
common:
- type: ParentCompany
  url: https://apis.io/providers/ibm/
  name: IBM
  x-relationship: acquired
  x-evidence: NS1 was acquired by IBM in 2022 and is delivered as IBM NS1 Connect; the api.
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/ns1-domain-security.yml
- type: Website
  url: https://ns1.com/
- type: DeveloperPortal
  url: https://developer.ibm.com/apis/catalog/ns1--ibm-ns1-connect-api/Introduction
- type: Documentation
  url: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/ns1-connect
- type: APIReference
  url: https://developer.ibm.com/apis/catalog/ns1--ibm-ns1-connect-api/Introduction
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/ns1
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/ns1-authentication.yml
- type: Conventions
  url: conventions/ns1-conventions.yml
- type: ErrorCatalog
  url: errors/ns1-error-codes.yml
- type: Lifecycle
  url: lifecycle/ns1-lifecycle.yml
- type: Packages
  url: packages/ns1-packages.yml
- type: SDKs
  url: packages/ns1-packages.yml
- type: CLI
  url: cli/ns1-cli.yml
- type: Protobuf
  url: grpc/ns1-bulkbeacon.proto
- type: WellKnown
  url: well-known/ns1-well-known.yml
- type: LLMsTxt
  url: llms/ns1-llms.txt

Work with this as data

Every provider here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.

MCP server

One button, every client — Claude, Cursor, VS Code and the rest.

https://apis.io/mcp

Tools for providers

9 MCP tools reach this

find_providersBrowse and filter every provider in the catalog.
get_provider_artifactsEvery artifact this provider publishes, grouped by type.
get_provider_operationsEvery operation across all of their OpenAPIs — one call instead of parsing every spec.
get_provider_toolsEvery MCP tool they ship, with the operation each wraps.
get_provider_evidenceHow each part of their score was established. Free — the basis for a claim should not sit behind it.
get_provider_ratingPRO — composite, band, trend and facet scores.
apis_io_searchSTART HERE — APIs, providers and tags for one query, each with its total.
resolveTurn a domain, URL or GitHub org into the provider it belongs to.
find_cohortsEvery scored population of providers in the catalog.

All 92 tools →

Call it yourself

curl for this page

This provider

curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/providers/ns1"

All providers

curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/providers?limit=25"

Every operation they expose

curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/providers/ns1/operations?limit=25"

How their score was established

curl "https://apis.io/api/v1/providers/ns1/evidence"

Discovery needs no key. Ratings and market analysis are Pro.

Get an API key

Free tier, no form to fill in. Signing in shares your email address with us — we store it to create your key and to recognise you if you sign in with another provider. See our Privacy Policy and Terms.

GitHub Google LinkedIn

A second provider on the same verified email joins the account you already have.