Overview: Pretty much every tester and developer loves postman. And that is because it makes our lives easier and it just plain awesome. Postman is bringing out tons of new features and I was playing around today looking how I could do continuous monitoring with my postman collections.
Thoughts & Playing:
I have a postman collection that runs 8 requests and does 14 asserts. The first request gets a new OAuth token using AAD login. Then I do a series of requests and I do an assert to ensure I am getting a 200 response code and that the response time is less than 3 seconds on each call. I can run the collection locally. Level 100 API verification looks good.
In the past, I have taken this collection and run it as a shortcut on my desktop using Powershell with the Postman CLI to display me the results. Makes my life easier.
I then added Elgato stream deck so I can run the monitor with a single button push (more me playing than real value). I'd say I'm at level 200 in continuous monitoring capability.
Next, I setup a monitor on the collection, and this allows me to login and view the dashboard and trace, great stuff, and I get an email if anything goes wrong as an alert. So now I'm getting serious about monitoring and alerting on my API's. Level 300 is approaching.
- 5 min for health and basic check (look for performance and service slowdown or failure; add alerts but don't over alert so use teams except if service breaks then Teams groups),
- Hourly, check key functionality/API's including CRUD operations and clean up (ensure the service is operating for most key endpoints), and
- Daily, in the early hours run a full regression API set of tests, and clean up afterwards (Support/help desk need to review each day).