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Why can't I authenticate to my Watson service?

Why can't I authenticate to my Watson service?

You try to authenticate to a Watson service but receive an error message.

When you send your credentials through a Watson API, you receive a 401 HTTP status code.

For example,

{
  "trace":"ec29c5a9-9f99-46a4-9cc0-81a0d4031f84",
  "error":"Unauthorized",
  "more_info":"https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson?topic=watson-authorization-error",
  "code":401
}

A 401 HTTP status code indicates that you are not authenticated. 401 is similar to 403, but refers only to authentication, not permissions or authorization.

Common causes include these situations:

  • The access token is expired.
  • The password or API key values include the placeholder brackets ({, }).
  • The instance uses username and password authentication.
  • The SDK authentication initialization is the wrong method.

Validate your credentials or try to authenticate with a different command.

  • Check your API key and endpoint URL against the service instance by clicking the name of the service instance in the Resource list and verifying the credentials.

  • If you are using an authorization or service ID to grant access, make sure that you use an endpoint URL that includes the service instance ID. You can find the instance ID by clicking the name of the service instance in the Resource list and looking at the credentials URL.

  • If you are authenticating through an SDK or other wrapper, call the method with a curl command. Using curl can help isolate whether you have an authentication issue.

    curl -X {request_method} -u "apikey:{apikey}" "{url}/{method}"

For more information, see the Authentication section of the API reference for your service.

If this error persists and your service plan covers it, you can get help by creating a case from IBM Cloud Support.