CDK Global
CDK Global is the dominant U.S. dealer management system (DMS) provider, serving roughly 15,000 automotive dealerships with software covering sales, F&I, fixed operations, parts, CRM, and digital retail. CDK was spun out of ADP in 2014 and acquired by Brookfield Business Partners in July 2022 for $8.3B (taken private). The company operates the Fortellis platform — a developer marketplace and integration hub with 135+ published APIs, 425+ marketplace apps, 82,000+ dealer integrations, and 6.7B+ API transactions per year — exposing CDK DMS data to ISVs, OEMs, and third-party automotive systems. CDK suffered a major BlackSuit ransomware attack on June 19, 2024, paying ~$25M in bitcoin to restore service over roughly two weeks; the outage caused an estimated $605M in dealer losses and triggered numerous lawsuits.
Solid contracts, transparent operations, and an easy start — typically complete on four or five facets with one clear soft spot.
API Evangelist profiles CDK Global the way a machine reads it — 61 machine-readable artifacts across 13 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — CDK Global scores 61.4/100 (strong), with a separate agent-readiness read of 54/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
How we profile CDK Global
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for CDK Global. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 13
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Fortellis Platform
Fortellis is CDK Global's open automotive commerce platform — an API gateway, app marketplace, and developer community that brokers data flow between dealerships, ISVs, OEMs, he...
Fortellis Event Relay Data Plane Proxy (AsyncAPI)
AsyncAPI specification for the Fortellis Event Relay data-plane proxy used by event sources to publish events into Fortellis for fan-out to subscribers.
Fortellis AsyncAPI Hello World Reference
Hello World AsyncAPI reference distributed by Fortellis to teach the asynchronous API pattern, channel topology, and message envelope conventions used across Fortellis event APIs.
CDK Global adopt API
The adopt API from CDK Global — 2 operation(s) for adopt.
CDK Global adopt delete API
The adopt delete API from CDK Global — 1 operation(s) for adopt delete.
CDK Global adopt update API
The adopt update API from CDK Global — 1 operation(s) for adopt update.
CDK Global cancel API
The cancel API from CDK Global — 1 operation(s) for cancel.
CDK Global create API
The create API from CDK Global — 1 operation(s) for create.
CDK Global events API
The events API from CDK Global — 1 operation(s) for events.
CDK Global manage API
The manage API from CDK Global — 1 operation(s) for manage.
CDK Global query API
The query API from CDK Global — 6 operation(s) for query.
CDK Global Service Booking API
The Service Booking API from CDK Global — 6 operation(s) for service booking.
CDK Global update API
The update API from CDK Global — 1 operation(s) for update.
Scroll within the panel for all 13 ·
Postman Collections 5
A runnable collection turns the contract into something a developer can execute in seconds. We profile them because the fastest way to trust an API is to make a real call against it.
Ready-to-run Postman collections for exercising this provider's APIs.
Open Collections 5
Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.
Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).
appointments
OPEN COLLECTIONFortellis Event Relay Webhook
OPEN COLLECTIONFortellis Sample Application
OPEN COLLECTIONPet Adoption
OPEN COLLECTIONBooking Sessions
OPEN COLLECTIONArazzo Workflows 13
Real integrations are rarely a single call. Arazzo describes the multi-step sequences — auth, then create, then confirm — so both a human and an agent can follow the choreography, not just the endpoints.
Multi-step API workflows described with the Arazzo specification.
CDK Global Add Service Session Item
Create a booking session, add a requested service item, and read it back.
ARAZZOCDK Global Book Service Session
Create a booking session, discover an available store and slot, and book it.
ARAZZOCDK Global Cancel Service Appointment
Find a customer's appointment, confirm it exists, then cancel it with a reason.
ARAZZOCDK Global Create Data Record
Add a record to the data domain store and read it back by its identifier.
ARAZZOCDK Global Inspect Available Slot
List a store's open slots and pull the full detail of the first slot.
ARAZZOCDK Global Parts Availability Check
Health-check the parts store, then look up a product only when it is up.
ARAZZOCDK Global Parts Inventory Lookup
List parts inventory, pull a product's detail, then read its size.
ARAZZOCDK Global Relay Appointment Event
Read a service appointment, then relay it as an event to an event sink.
ARAZZOCDK Global Remove Service Session Item
Confirm a booking session item exists, then remove it from the session.
ARAZZOCDK Global Reschedule Service Appointment
Read an existing appointment, update its date/time, then confirm the change.
ARAZZOCDK Global Schedule Service Appointment
Create a service appointment for a vehicle and read it back to confirm.
ARAZZOCDK Global Update Data Record
Read a data-domain record, branch on whether it exists, then update it.
ARAZZOCDK Global Update Service Session Item
Create a booking session, query a requested item, and update its details.
ARAZZOScroll within the panel for all 13 ·
Pricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Rate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Cdk Global Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Cdk Global Finops
FINOPSEvent Specifications 2
Not every API is request/response. AsyncAPI describes the event-driven and streaming side — the webhooks and channels — so the asynchronous half of the interface is documented the same way the synchronous half is.
AsyncAPI definitions for this provider's event-driven and streaming APIs.
Fortellis Event Relay Data API
Provides an Event Source (Publisher) the ability to post event through Fortellis Event Relay.
ASYNCAPISemantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Cdk Global Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 3
Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.
JSON Schema 5
Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
Fortellis Booking Session
JSON SCHEMAFortellis Event
JSON SCHEMAFortellis Marketplace App
JSON SCHEMAFortellis Part
JSON SCHEMAFortellis Service Appointment
JSON SCHEMAJSON Structure 2
JSON Structure captures the data shapes in a form built for tooling — a complement to JSON Schema that keeps the model machine-legible.
JSON Structure definitions describing this provider's data shapes.
Fortellis Event Structure
JSON STRUCTUREFortellis Service Appointment Structure
JSON STRUCTUREExamples 5
Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.
Example request and response payloads for these APIs.
Security Posture 2
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Scopes 1
OAuth scopes are the vocabulary of least-privilege access. Profiling them shows exactly what an integration — or an agent acting on a user's behalf — is allowed to do.
OAuth scopes governing access to this provider's APIs.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for CDK Global — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 2
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 2
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 16
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Scroll within the panel for all 16 ·
Build 15
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Scroll within the panel for all 15 ·
Access & Security 4
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 2
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 2
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 4
The organization behind the API
Other 1
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
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