How to Export Cisco Secure Access App Category Data

We were inside Cisco Secure Access, looking at Application Lists, trying to answer one basic question: what apps are actually sitting under each category? The UI was good enough to browse around, but not good enough to work with the data properly. We did not want category names on a screen. We wanted the actual application records.

At that point, chasing a formal API path was not the fastest move. The browser was already loading the exact payload the page needed, so we took the simpler route: open dev tools, capture the request, and inspect the response directly. That gave us the real dataset without wasting time guessing through the interface.

Once we pulled the response, the whole problem changed. It stopped being a UI problem and became a dataset problem. That is where things got useful, because now we could search it, sample it, export it, and actually see how Cisco Secure Access was organizing apps across categories.

Cisco Secure Access Application Lists Workflow

The path was straightforward:

1. Open Resources > Internet and SaaS Resources > Application Lists.
2. Open browser developer tools and switch to the Network tab.
3. Filter to XHR or Fetch and reload the page.
4. Open the request returning the application payload and inspect the Response tab.

That response is the source of truth. The UI is only a rendered view of it.

That is really the whole trick. We did not "discover" some separate hidden dataset. We just inspected the same response the page was already using.

Cisco Secure Access Export Snapshot

From the export we generated:

• 10,715 total application entries
• 40 categories
• 5.8 MB JSON export

That was enough to move this from a quick inspection exercise into something genuinely useful. Once we had the export in hand, we could search it, sort it, sample it, and understand how broad the category data really was.

Browse the Cisco Secure Access App Inventory

The export includes application names, descriptions, visibility, URL flags, IDs, and category mapping. The preview below loads the full dataset, shows the total row count, and lets you browse or search the returned records before downloading the JSON.

This is the part that matters most in practice. Once the data is out of the page and into a usable export, you can actually work with it. You can search for a known app, see how a category is populated, spot whether URL-backed entries exist, and get a realistic feel for the scale of the dataset instead of relying on a small on-screen sample.

Video Reference for the Export Steps

If you want to see the exact browser workflow instead of just reading it, the video below shows the same sequence end to end: opening Application Lists, capturing the network call, and inspecting the response payload that contains the category app data.

Final Takeaway

We did this because we wanted the real category app data, not a partial view of it.

We did not start with a formal API path because the browser was already fetching exactly what we needed, and validating that payload was the fastest way to answer the question in front of us.

Once we captured the response, the rest was straightforward. The category view stopped being a UI problem and became a dataset problem, which is a much better place to be.

Niko George Senior Security Engineer, Technoxi