Troubleshoot traffic issues

You've set up the Postman Insights Agent, and you've been running API traffic across the network, but your API model page is either empty or shows random endpoints you don't care about.

The endpoints you expected to find in your first Insights project may not be appearing for the following reasons:

• Permission issues that prevent the Insights Agent from seeing traffic. See Insights project permissions for solutions.
• Your endpoints are encrypted. See Encrypted traffic for workarounds.
• The Insights Agent is seeing mostly health checks and infrastructure endpoints, and your other traffic isn't getting through. You can filter them out by path or IP address or increase the rate limit.
• ECS on EC2 with bridge networking. You can install Insights Agent as a daemon service only. See the installation instructions.
• Data formats that the Insights Agent doesn't recognize. Contact Support.

Insights project permissions

You may come across the following error message when you try to update your Insights project.

[ERROR] You cannot send traffic to the to the service with ID svc_01234AaBbCcDd. Ensure that your collection ID is correct and that you have edit permissions on the collection. If you don't have edit permissions, please contact the workspace administrator to add you as a collection editor.

This issue can occur for the following reasons:

• You don't have the right project ID. To locate the project ID, select your Insights Project and then select the Diagnostics tab. The project ID is an alphanumeric string that begins with svc_.

  

• You don't have the required permission. Please contact your Workspace Admin for access.

Irrelevant or missing endpoints

You may have been able to successfully generate an API model, but most of the outputs are health checks.

The Insights Agent samples your traffic, rather than sending all of your traffic to Postman. As a result, health check and infrastructure endpoints can dominate the traffic that the Insights Agent sees. The Insights Agent's rate limiting (which defaults to 1000 calls per minute) may cause some API calls to be dropped. You can filter out the health endpoints or increase the rate limit to ensure you get the endpoints you care about.

To increase the Insights Agent's ability to capture meaningful, non-health check data, you can set up filters on the Insights Agent.

Filter out endpoints by path

You can filter out traffic by using the --path-exclusions flag.

To remove a health check endpoint, for instance, use apidump with the --path-exclusions flag, specifying the path part of the health check.

For example, the following command causes all the /health endpoints on all hosts to be ignored by the Insights Agent:

apidump --project <projectID> –-path-exclusions ^/health$

The argument to --path-exclusions is a Go regular expression, which may match any part of the path. The special characters ^ and $ set the start and end of a string, preventing the filter from matching other paths that include the string /health, like /employee/health-benefits.

Filter out endpoints by IP address

If your model contains API calls to unnamed infrastructure services accessed by the IP address, you can remove them by using a regular expression in the --host-exclusions flag, as follows:

apidump --project <projectID> –-host-exclusions ^(\d)+\.(\d)+\.(\d)+\.(\d)+$

This removes all endpoints whose host is given by a dotted-quad IP address.

Increase rate limit

If you get the error that the agents have seen traffic exceeding the rate limit of 1000 requests per minute, you can adjust the rate limit on your Insights Agent.

Locate postman-insights-agent in your deployment and add the --rate-limit flag with a higher value.

For example, if you're on an ECS deployment, do the following:

1. Under the Task definitions tab, select postman-insights-agent.
2. From the Create new version dropdown list, select Create new version with JSON
3. Add the flag --rate-limit=12000.0.
4. Click Create.

Encrypted traffic

If your model is missing expected endpoints or is empty, you may be trying to observe your API at a point where it's encrypted. In Postman, navigate to the Insights Project's Diagnostics tab and review the client reports listed there. Check whether the Insights Agent detected any traffic encrypted with TLS.