Install Postman Insights Agent as a sidecar

After you create an Insights project and select Kubernetes, you can begin your Insights Agent installation as a sidecar. To reproduce errors on real user data, activate the Insights' Repro Mode.

Estimated time: 10-minute setup, 5-minute wait

After onboarding a service, you'll see your endpoints and their insights. Then, you can leverage the Insights' Repro Mode to debug your failing endpoints.

Requirements

• Edit permissions for the Kubernetes deployment.
• Postman Workspace Admin or Editor role.
• Linux environment. The agent and the user’s service should be running in a Linux environment.
• Insights project. See Get started with Postman Insights to learn more.

Install the Insights Agent

To install the Insights Agent, do the following:

1. As shown on the Insights onboarding screen, run the following command on your command line:

   bash -c "$(curl -L https://releases.observability.postman.com/scripts/install-postman-insights-agent.sh)"
   

2. Navigate to the correct Kubernetes cluster and get the existing deployment configuration.

     kubectl get deployments -A
   

3. On the Insights onboarding screen, select Add API key to copy and paste it with the next command.

4. Use the kube inject command to set up the Postman Insights Agent in your Kubernetes environment and edit the deployment file. For more information about this command and its flags, see kube inject.

   In the example command below, the angle brackets and the text between them are placeholders. The command you copy in the onboarding screen will contain your correct API key and project ID.

   kubectl get -n <namespace> deployment/<deployment> -o yaml \
   | POSTMAN_API_KEY=<add-your-api-key-here> postman-insights-agent kube inject --project <projectId> --repro-mode -s=true -f - \
   | kubectl apply -f -
   

   The following example shows the values the Insights Agent adds to the deployment.

   

   The command creates a secret to hold your Postman key and updates the deployment with the Postman sidecar. The response looks something like this:

   secret/postman-agent-secrets created
   deployment.apps/cloud-api-deployment configured
   

5. Check the status of your Kubernetes container pods.

   kubectl get pods -n <your_namespace>
   

   The status response looks something like this:

   NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
   cloud-api-deployment-5db4fBc64-cknhc 2/2 Running 0 4h40m
   cloud-api-deployment-7f97856c7f-p5Lv7 2/2 Running 0 15h
   

6. Get the logs from the sidecar.

   kubectl logs -n <your_namespace> <your_pod> postman-insights-agent
   

7. Let the Insights Agent run for a minute and observe the HTTP and TLS traffic on your ports.

8. Return to Postman and observe an Insights Project populated for your services.

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 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 sidecar from your Kubernetes deployment, do the following:

1. Access the sidecar in your Kubernetes deployment directory.

   kubectl edit -n {your namespace} deployment/{your namespace}
   

2. Find the spec: section, then navigate to the containers: section within it.

3. Delete the Postman Insights Agent container with "image: public.ecr.aws/postman/postman-insights-agent:latest".

To uninstall the Insights Agent client on Debian and macOS, follow the steps listed below. For all other distributions of Linux and other operating systems, remove the postman-insights-agent file from your executable file location. To fully uninstall, also remove the sidecar from your Kubernetes deployment.

To uninstall the Insights Agent client from Debian, run the following:

apt remove postman-insights-agent

To uninstall the Insights Agent client from macOS, run the following:

brew uninstall postman-insights-agent