Setting up a monitor
Postman Monitoring offers a number of configuration options when creating a monitor, allowing you to seamlessly integrate it into your team's API development workflow.
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Creating a monitor
You can create a Postman monitor using a number of flows both in and outside of Postman:
Creating a monitor from Overview
When you open a workspace in Postman, an Overview tab is automatically generated that includes details about the workspace and its latest activity. To create a monitor from the Overview tab, select ... View More under Get Started, then Create a monitor.
Creating a monitor from the sidebar
In Postman, select Monitors in the left sidebar. Click the + icon in the upper-left to create a monitor. If there are no monitors in your current workspace, you can also click the Create a monitor that appears to make one.
Creating a monitor via a collection
In Postman, hover over your collection and select ... > Monitor Collection.
Creating a monitor from an API
Open an API version from APIs on the left of Postman, and then select the Monitoring tab. Select Add Monitor, and then select Create new monitor or Add existing monitor. For more details, see Observing an API.
Creating a monitor with the New button
In Postman, click New in the upper-left corner, then Monitor.
Creating a monitor from history
In Postman, select History, hover over your request, click ... > Monitor Request.
Creating a monitor with the Postman API
You can create a monitor with a POST request to the Postman API. Visit the API docs > Monitors > Create Monitor to learn how to do so.
The basics when creating a monitor
You will need to give your new monitor a name and designate the collection you would like it to run. If you added the monitor from an API using an existing collection, you can select a release tag for the monitor. You can also add an environment here if you would like your monitor to use one.
Postman maintains ceiling limits on various team and user actions, including monitor creation. For more information, see Usage limits.
From here, you can determine how you'd like to configure your monitor.
Configuring a monitor
You can utilize a number of custom configuration options provided by Postman monitoring.
Scheduling monitors
You can configure your monitor to run as often as you would like, automatically. This could be up to every five minutes for a status page or a basic check once a week on your endpoints.
Scheduling options are limited by plan type. If you are on a paid plan, you can schedule monitors to run as often as every five minutes. If you are on a free plan, you can schedule monitors to run as often as every hour.
Frequency affects how quickly your monitoring usage compounds. To learn more about usage limits and overages, see Pricing.
Adding regions
You can allow Postman to auto-select a region for your monitor or you can opt to select your regions manually. Postman offers multiple regions to choose from, enabling you to accurately track uptime and reliability on a global scale, without the need to procure your own regional servers.
Servers in each selected region will run your monitor according to your schedule, counting towards your monitoring usage.
Using static IP
Static IPs are available on Postman Business and Enterprise plans. This option allows you to securely monitor private APIs using a direct channel to Postman. Learn how you can monitor using static IPs.
Updating email preferences
You will receive daily and weekly summaries of your active monitors in Postman and via email.
You can opt out of daily or weekly summaries by selecting your avatar in the upper-right corner of Postman and clicking Notification Preferences.
When creating or editing a monitor, you can choose to receive email notifications for run failures and errors under Show Additional Preferences. You can define up to five recipients and configure when you would like to stop failure notifications for consecutive run failures.
Once the number of consecutive failures exceeds your defined notification limit, Postman will wait until your run succeeds to notify you. By default this limit is three.
You can find detailed information on your monitor results by navigating to your workspace, selecting Monitors in the left sidebar, then selecting your monitor.
You can also utilize Postman integrations to send monitor data and configure notifications using your desired platform, such as Slack or Datadog.
Using retry on failure
You have the option to Retry if run fails. If this is enabled and a failure occurs during a run, Postman will automatically rerun the failed request to avoid false alarms due to transient issues. Postman will still log the initial failure, but will only notify you if the run continues to fail.
If you choose to enable this option, it will affect your monitoring usage and the resulting billing. For example, if a collection of three requests fails on the first request, but retries successfully, the run will count as four total requests.
Adding request timeouts
You can configure a Request timeout if you'd like to make sure all of your requests run within a certain amount of time. By default, requests do not have a timeout value, however each monitor run has a timeout of five minutes. It is not possible to configure this at the request level.
Request timeout may not exceed five minutes (300000 ms).
Adding delays between requests
You can add a Delay between requests to your monitor. This will insert a delay between all requests in your collection. To configure this for individual requests, you can add a delay in your pre-request or test scripts with setTimeout().
Delay between requests may not exceed five minutes (300000 ms), however note that five minutes is also the maximum run time for a monitor.
Managing redirect behavior
You can use Follow redirects to allow URL redirection for requests run via a monitor.
Disabling SSL validation
You can Disable SSL validation if you are using self-signed certificates to stop validations of SSL certificates. For more information, see Certificates. To troubleshoot, see Troubleshooting Self-signed SSL Certificate Issues.
Next steps
Learn how to set up integrations for your monitoring results, and how to monitor your APIs and websites.