A Bird’s Eye View of the Postman Ecosystem (Postman 1 of 4)

Overview of Postman's powerful features and tools

Introduction

Many developers, myself included until recently, still don’t know about Postman’s extensive capabilities and features beyond the standard app, collections, and requests platform. Postman is a comprehensive tool designed to be an entire platform and source of truth for your individual or team’s API development and testing.

Postman has defined an API lifecycle and, with the evolution of more sophisticated web and application software over the last two decades, has over time created a unique and creative set of tools to address different touch points in this API lifecycle. 

One of the most important parts of Postman that developers don’t know today is about its open-source, public license Collections Format, which allows you to export, import and share public or private APIs outside of Postman. Yes - in the process you do lose some of Postman’s unique proprietary capabilities, but it’s quite honorable the approach that Google’s Postman team has taken over time to create a platform that provides a truly professional tool for developers to design, develop, test, and continuously release APIs in a standardized way.

This blog post is just a summary of the many features that Postman comes with, including links to Postman developer documents to explore them more in depth. This is also the first blog post of four (from me) about Postman’s ecosystem. In part 2, we will explore the top features that beginner to advanced developers will want to use in their everyday work for developing first-class backend software systems.

Four Part Series

Key Features

1. Send requests

2. Write scripts

3. Use collections

4. Use Postman Flows

5. Use Postman CLI

6. Collaborate in Postman

7. Design and develop

8. Document your API

9. Monitor your API

10. API Governance and API Security

11. Administration

12. User reports

13. Developer resources

14. Integrations 

1 / Sending requests

• Sending API requests in Postman is the primary feature

• Postman allows you to create HTTP requests for all method types (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, …) as well as send requests for other protocols like GraphQL

• Requests are easy to create, save and reuse

2 / Write scripts

• The Postman app comes with a Node runtime environment that is able to execute Javascript code

• You can add pre- or post-request scripts and utilize variables to have dynamic requests and behavior 

• Scripts are commonly use for embedding variables into the header or body or for testing and asserting statements

Use collections

• Collections are the group entity that allow us to organize a set of requests together - you can think of them as parent folders

• Collections can also be further organized and segmented into groups and sub-groups of requests - on Postman, these look like folders

• The secondary benefit of collections, beyond their ability to keep things organized for us, is the capability that Postman comes with to allow us to run an entire group or collection (set of groups), which will trigger every request inside that group/collection

• We can trigger these groups or collections manually or automatically (on schedule from a CI/CD pipeline using the Postman CLI tool)

Use Postman Flows

• Postman Flows is a visual tool for creating API workflows 

• You can use Flows to chain requests, handle data and create real-world flows 

• Flows can act as an intermediary short-term or even potentially long-term no-code alternative to CD/CI testing

• Flows can also be used for document generation on production APIs - we can create a flow that given a set of dynamic inputs generates a set of outputs and reports with the data - and with Postman’s extensive integrations, we can take the data outside the platform with Flows and integrations

Use Postman CLI

• The Postman CLI is just a CLI tool that allows us to run Postman actions from the command line - an incredibly powerful feature, which allows us to take our clicks and groupings into automated and repeatable CI/CD pipelines

• The Postman CLI allows you to execute collections and requests from the CLI

• You can also utilize it to get information or apply modifications to existing workspaces, collections, requests

Collaboration inside Postman

• Postman has an extensive set of collaboration features - which allow us to define organizations, workspaces, admins, roles, permission groups, and utilize all these collaborative functions to have multiple members work with and contribute to our development and testing inside Postman

• Common features

  • Define organizational roles, permissions and users

  • Define shared workspaces of collections and configurations

  • Allow people to comment on specific entities like collections or requests

  • Allow versioning on API definitions and scripts 

Design and develop

• Postman follows an API-first development with the API Builder

• Use the builder to define one source of truth for your API

• You can then connect this Postman source of truth to other development tools with integrations

• Common integrations

  • Documentation

  • Tests

  • Monitoring 

• You can also sync and maintain your API in Postman in a Git repository

  • This can be accomplished since the Postman Collections Format is an open source format

Document your API

• Documentation is a major feature in API development - and Postman considers it so - by embedding a documentation viewer with a Markdown editor inside every collection, group and request

• Document any part of a collection or API - you can apply the documentation to a hyper-specific entity or to an entire collection

• For note, by default, documentation is private 

Monitor your API

• Postman Monitors gives you continuous visibility into health and performance of an API

• Monitors enables you to run API test scripts, chain them together, and validate critical flows

• A monitor runs a series of requests from the Postman cloud on a schedule that you define 

API Governance and API Security

• API Governance is the practice of defining and applying development rules that promote consistent API behaviors across your organization’s API landscape

• The Postman API Governance can also help you identify weaknesses and inconsistencies

  • It provides recommendations for fixes and improvements 

Administration

• Provides options to customize your team’s experience, from setup to management

• You can set up a Team Admin and create an onboarding process

• You can also manage access control and versioning

User reports

• Postman generates reports that enable you to visualize data for how your team uses Postman

• Reports give you insights into the state of your APIs, including

  • Tests

  • Documentation

  • Monitoring coverage 

• Reports also enable you to track performance and SLA adherence 

Developer resources and integrations

• You can use 3rd party developer resources to create or use existing external Postman integrations 

• A common integration it to create CI/CD workflows 

There’s More!

Below are two links that continue to explore Postman’s ecosystem from Google/Postman’s official documentation and developer blogs. I would strongly recommend going deeper into the topics which you are specifically interested in adding to your workflow.

Postman Developer Resources

https://learning.postman.com/docs/developer/resources-intro

Postman 3rd Party Solutions

https://learning.postman.com/docs/integrations/intro-integrations