Use Existing Postman Collections with Monika: An Alternative Solution to Postman Monitoring
If you’re using Postman, you’ve probably heard about the Postman Monitoring feature. If you haven’t, then let me explain it in general. Postman Monitoring helps you to stay up to date on the health and performance of your APIs. Within a matter of seconds, you can set up Postman’s monitoring service and integrate it into your API development pipeline. By simply providing a Postman collection, Postman will run through each request in your collection.
Sounds like a cool feature, huh? But Uncle Ben from Spiderman said:
“With great features comes great pricing” — RIP Uncle Ben
Postman has some limitations on their free tier. Below are the limitations of the free tier, taken from their documentation page:
- Maximum number of active and paused monitors per team = 300
- Maximum parallel runs of multiple monitors = 500
- Maximum parallel runs of a single monitor = 200
If you have capped your limitation, you will have to wait for a monthly reset for you to use it again. Sure, you can hold yourself until next month but you probably couldn’t risk it.
Run Postman collection with Monika
What is Monika? Monika is an open-source and free synthetic monitoring command-line application. The name Monika stands for “Monitoring Berkala”, which means “periodic monitoring” in the Indonesian language.
With Monika, you can add as many websites as you want to monitor. You can monitor several conditions such as service outages or slow services. Also, you can configure Monika to send notifications of the incidents on your services through your favorite communication tools like SMTP mail, Telegram, WhatsApp (It’s free!), etc.
If you haven’t read my articles about connecting Monika with Prometheus and visualize the data using Grafana, then you should.
So how we do it?
Let’s assume that you already have a simple Postman collection. To use it with Monika, you need to export the collection first. Hover to your Postman collection, click the three dots icon, and click Export. Then, select Collection v2.1. Save it to your local folder.
After you exported your collection, navigate to your terminal and install Monika right away using NPM:
npm install -g @hyperjumptech/monikaAfter the installation has been completed, move to the directory where you exported the Postman collection, and simply run monika --postman <your_postman_config.json>
By default, it will check if your API response status code is not 200, and the response time is greater than 2 seconds. If you’re ready to move completely from Postman to Monika for monitoring your API, you can create your configuration to monitor your websites using many options available using Monika Config Generator below:
Closing
Postman is one of the great tools to monitor your API, but maybe you’re looking for a free and open-source solution for your needs. With Monika, you can easily monitor websites without any monthly limitations. You can install Monika anywhere you want and monitor your websites right away.
If you have any feature requests, issues, bugs, let us know in our Github by creating an issue. Don’t forget to give Monika a star in our Github if you enjoy using it!
Thank you for reading this short article, until next time!
