At its foundation, Circonus is an API driven service. As a RESTful service, the Circonus API is designed to allow users to programmatically adjust monitors and alerts as their architecture evolves.
The web portal "front-end" we provide to our customers is one interpretation of the Circonus API. Our customers can, and have, created their own "front-ends". The Circonus "back-end" can be accessed via the API to any system you wish - the data extracted from our "back-end" can be as simple as events, which are fed into an existing ticketing tool, or complex data extractions fed into a system like R.
The “back-end”/”front-end” delineation is quite important here. In an API driven service like Circonus, the front-end is you or, more specifically, any thing you want to write against our APIs. Often times, when using services there are two types of API consumers: third-party tools and internal tools. On the internal tools side are the Python or Ruby or Java programs you write to turn knobs, register checks, configure alerts and otherwise poke and prod at your Circonus account. The third-party tools are simply the tools that someone else authored and released for your use.
The full API Documentation is available here.