Postman monitoring helps BetterCloud optimize and automate API testing

BetterCloud offers a tool suite for SaaSOps professionals, helping IT admins and security professionals manage data and activity across the digital workplace. The platform offers a portfolio of REST APIs that help customers optimize and automate workflows, integrating with major business productivity tools like Google, Office365, and Slack. BetterCloud's volume is massive and growing—the platform handles up to five billion API calls per day, that's up to 50 calls per millisecond, and it also streams about 3.5 billion events per day.

The platform consists of over 700 internal APIs that power BetterCloud's microservices and provide back-end functionality for authentication and APIOps tooling. In addition, there are over 30 externally built APIs that enable third-party integrations, with some of those APIs directly exposed to customers and partners. Postman lies at the heart of this ecosystem, allowing BetterCloud to more easily collaborate, test, and manage the portfolio.

“APIOps is a growing trend in IT, and many SaaS providers are exposing endpoints via REST APIs. Postman is a great front-end tool for managing them all.”

David Esposito, Platform Architect, BetterCloud

The challenge of managing hundreds of APIs and users

Maintaining a large API portfolio within an enterprise-sized organization can be challenging. BetterCloud needs to ensure a smooth and consistent experience for API producers and consumers across the hundreds of APIs that they may touch. This is especially the case when internal teams are designing, developing, and updating individual APIs. The company needs a structured way to ensure both the performance of each API, as well as the correctness and consistency of things like query parameters, capitalization, and header naming schemes. From BetterCloud's perspective, if an internal user knows how to work with API number one, then they should be able to know how to work with API number 699.

At BetterCloud, there are a lot of users—the engineering organization is over one hundred strong and growing. The company chose Postman to be the centralized API source of truth for everyone in the org. BetterCloud's testing teams, for example, regularly use Postman to feature and smoke test, as well as sample workflows. They can access requests stored as Postman Collections to learn how an API works for a particular use case or collaborate with developers to ensure the correct response is returned each time. Using Postman Scripts, testers and developers can easily build, make assertions, and pass data between requests, while Collection Runner send all of the requests within a collection in specified sequence, which helps to automate the workflow.

“You don't have to be a large enterprise with a 100+ engineering team to get value from Postman. Even a team of five can benefit from the platform's tools and processes.”

David Esposito, Platform Architect, BetterCloud

Postman Monitoring helps teams stay productive

As BetterCloud grows, the company continually looks at ways to optimize its technologies, processes, and resources. Postman Monitoring helps BetterCloud keep developers and testers productive, saving valuable time and resource costs.

One of BetterCloud's favorite productivity features is Postman Monitoring. This helps developers and testers keep track of the health and performance of their API, allowing them to easily review API responses and availability with each run. Monitors also help developers anticipate when API response times will need to be addressed during development, which helps inform planning and resource allocation. Because Postman Monitoring is built into the platform, setup is a breeze. Within a few minutes, developers can set up monitors and integrate them into their development pipeline.

BetterCloud teams also use Postman Monitoring to further automate testing processes. Using test scripts set up in Postman, monitors can be scheduled to run through every request in the collection, with a corresponding environment and variables attached, as frequently as every five minutes. When tests fail, the team can automatically receive notifications via email or integrated alerts through Slack or PagerDuty. APIOps and Support teams also use monitors to view historical trends and track performance, so they can respond more quickly to issues as they arise.

“One of the things we love most about Postman is the Postman Monitor tooling with rich functionality out of the box. You can follow a simple tutorial and have a monitor up and running in five minutes.”

David Esposito, Platform Architect, BetterCloud

Opportunities for using Postman to improve APIOps

BetterCloud continues to explore new ways to use Postman. With Collections and Workspaces, teams are able to stay organized and consistent, while also using Postman Monitoring to scale their API portfolio management. Next, the BetterCloud team plans to move resiliency testing onto Postman to help further streamline APIOps.