Use Existing Account

In the setup guide it states creating a new "monitoring" role and user but we already have a monitoring role for another system.  I would prefer to use it's existing password instead of utilizing the perl command for creating secure password.  Since we have a lot of clusters I don't really want to go and create a new role, new user and apply SSH registry on each controller.  I have realized I can edit the etc/stor2rrd.cfg and change the PreferredAuthenicationMedthods from "passkey" to "password" and when I run the config check it prompts me for the password and everything is accepted ACCEPT after "Testing API Connection..." it states "ERROR (date) na_apitest.pl: API test failed: Unauthorized".  I have double checked that the local NetApp user does have ontapi permissions so I'm not sure what's happening.  If I do use that same account, add the SSH keys to the controller and use the Perl script to create a secure password everything checks out when I run the config check.  So what am I missing?  How/can I use an existing local account and password?
Thank you.