Postman Collection Monitoring

Seamless Postman Collection Monitoring with APIContext

APIContext has partnered with our friends at Postman to take Postman collection monitoring to the next level, with a completely automated solution that lets you take full advantage of the APIContext global network of Cross-Cloud agents and the ease of Postman’s collection management tools.

What does that mean?

If you have a significant set of tests in Postman that you’ve been working with during development but want to move to a more robust system for monitoring your production setup, it can seem daunting to move the entire test configuration over to another product.

To simplify this, APIContext now offers two different approaches to having the best of both worlds.

Option 1 is to import your Postman collection using our importer and then set up the environment. The upside here is you will be able to manage the collection within APIContext and have an easier time of the security handling. The downside is there is a significant overhead in terms of time.

Option2, which we developed in conjunction with the team at Postman, is to sync the collection directly to Postman using the Postman API.

By syncing your Postman collection directly to APIContext, we can run your entire collection through the APIContext network and gather stats on the process with almost no work needed on your part. If the collection runs in Postman, it will run in the same way through about 40 of our Azure, Google and AWS locations with no additional setup needed on your part.

READ HOW TO RUN A COLLECTION IN DETAIL

Key Features

With our integration to Postman you don’t have to worry about configuring anything in APIContext, BUT you will need to have a premium account in Postman for the collection to sync correctly as the process of running calls will use one of your Postman API call quota per sequence, plus whatever APIContext calls you use.

The key steps to the process are simple:

1. Enter your Postman API key into the APImetrics product (read the full guide at Postman here)
2. Select the collection you are planning to monitor
3. Confirm the environment details
4. Schedule the collection to run through our network of Newman based agents (we currently have about 40 across AWS, Azure and Google data centers using our standard scheduling engine
5. Sit back and watch the results come in.

APIContext will also take the alerting cues from the configuration in your Postman Collection, which means that errors and issues will be picked up automatically and used in our insights engine.

To get the most out of our cross-cloud functionality you will need to add the following to your Postman collection before you turn on monitoring:

Connection: close

This will close the current TCP connection and force our agents to do a complete new connect each time the API calls run. This will give you the networking data which is critical to understanding how APIs perform globally and show you where there might be issues with your customer configurations or hosting choices.

Everything included

You get access to all the reporting, alerting through our wide range of webhook integrations like Ops Genie, Pager Duty and all the automated insights that you would have from setting up inside APImetrics but you can control the experience inside your test setup directly from your Postman collection in Postman itself.

With APImetrics projects, you can also share these configurations with other members of the team, or share the results and output to non-engineers without them having access to Postman itself. Giving you confidence in your ability to share reporting without interfering in your test set up.