Install Postman Insights Agent on AWS Elastic Beanstalk

The Postman Insights Agent listens to the traffic arriving at the cluster service you want to monitor and automatically populates your Insights project with endpoints.

Estimated time: 15-minute setup, 10-minute wait

To use the Insights Agent with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, complete the following steps.

This installation is a three-part process consisting of:

• Downloading and installing the Insights Agent using AWS Elastic Beanstalk configuration files (.ebextensions).
• Adding the required configs as environment variables to the service that you want to onboard to Insights.
• Activating Repro Mode, to enable you to reproduce errors on real user data.

Requirements

• systemd support. Your Beanstalk environment EC2 Instances’ OS supports systemd.
• Insights project. See Get started with Postman Insights to learn more.

Onboard your service to Insights

To continue onboarding your service, you'll collect your project ID and API key, download an AWS Elastic Beanstalk configuration file, and add the required environment variables to your Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) deployment.

Get your project ID

Go to the Diagnostics tab to locate your project ID string, formatted as svc_xxxxxxxxxx. Keep it for the next steps.

Get your Postman API key

Get or create a new API key. For more information, see Generate and use Postman API keys. Keep the API key for the next steps.

Manage and store the API Key

You can store the API key directly as part of the ELB environment configuration.

If you have security concerns, you can store the API key in other secure places, like AWS Secrets Manager.

If you use a secret manager, ensure the following:

• Edit the configuration file to fetch the secret value.
• Have an IAM role for the ELB environment with permissions to fetch the secret value.

Download and install AWS Elastic Beanstalk configuration file

To install the Insights Agent, do the following:

1. Create a folder named .ebextensions inside your Elastic BeanStalk Application source bundle.

2. Download the postman-insights-agent-beanstalk.config file and store it in the .ebextensions folder.

3. Deploy your application to the ELB environment using one of the following methods:

   • Elastic Beanstalk Console
   • EB CLI
   • AWS CLI

After successful deployment, continue to the next step.

Add environment variables to your deployment

Next, you'll add the required environment variables to install and start the Insights Agent in your ELB environment instances.

To add the required environment variables to your ELB environment, do the following:

1. Open the Elastic Beanstalk console, and select your AWS Region from the Regions list.

2. In the navigation pane, select Environments, then select your environment's name from the list.

3. Click Configuration.

4. In the Updates, monitoring, and logging configuration category, click Edit.

5. Scroll down to Environment properties and select Add environment property.

6. Enter the following property name and value pairs and click Apply:

   • ENABLE_POSTMAN_INSIGHTS: true

   • POSTMAN_INSIGHTS_API_KEY: <your-api-key>

   • POSTMAN_INSIGHTS_PROJECT_ID: <project-id>

   • POSTMAN_INSIGHTS_ENABLE_REPRO_MODE: true

   The following is a list of all variable options.

   Environment variable	Description
   ENABLE_POSTMAN_INSIGHTS_AGENT	Install and start the Insights Agent.
   POSTMAN_INSIGHTS_API_KEY	Your Postman API Key, which will be used to send traffic data from your service.
   POSTMAN_INSIGHTS_PROJECT_ID	Your Insights project ID from the Postman app, which will be used as destination for collected witnesses (traces).
   POSTMAN_INSIGHTS_ENABLE_REPRO_MODE	Turn on Repro Mode to send request and response payloads to Postman.
   POSTMAN_INSIGHTS_ADDITIONAL_FLAGS	Additional flags to pass to postman-insights-agent apidump. Example: --host-allow ... --rate-limit ....

7. Save and apply the environment properties.

This will start the environment update process in your environment. Wait for the process to complete before proceeding to the next step.

Deploy your application

For reference, see Deploying applications to Elastic Beanstalk environments (AWS Elastic Beanstalk).

Postman uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk configuration files (.ebextensions) to install and run the Insights Agent. .ebextensions run during the application deployment process only.

To redeploy the existing application version, do the following:

1. Open the Elastic Beanstalk console, and in the Regions list, select your AWS Region.

2. In the navigation pane, click Applications, then select your application's name from the list.

3. Click Application version and select the application version to deploy.

4. Click Actions > Deploy.

5. Select the environment where you've added environment configurations, and then click Deploy.

To learn more, see Redeploying a previous version (AWS Elastic Beanstalk).

Tip: If you're not seeing your endpoints right away, traffic may be taking some time to collect. See the next section for more information.

Wait for the Insights Agent to collect traffic

After Insights detects traffic from the Insights Agent, you'll get automatically redirected to the Overview page. The Insights Agent needs 5-8 minutes to use AI to generate endpoints.

If you're only seeing health checks, your traffic may be affected. If you're not seeing what you expect after 10 minutes, see Diagnose and troubleshoot Insights Agent errors.

Activate Repro Mode

To make it possible to make API calls using real user data, you need to activate Repro Mode. Go to your Insights project and select Settings. Then, toggle on Activate Repro Mode.

Only a Workspace Admin can enable the Repro Mode.

Default data redactions. Postman Insights automatically redacts a set of sensitive values including authentication tokens. See the full list. You can also add fields to redact ahead of turning on the feature.

Uninstall the Insights Agent

To remove the Insights Agent:

1. Remove the postman-insights-agent-beanstalk.config file from the .ebextensions folder.

2. Deploy your application to the Beanstalk environment using one of the following methods:

   • Elastic Beanstalk Console
   • EB CLI
   • AWS CLI

3. Remove the added ELB environment configurations.