However, there are certain limitations you need to consider before going through the effort of using Postman. Limitations of using Postman for load testingĪt this point, it should be apparent that performing load tests with Postman is by all means possible. If your CI/CD provider isn’t on this list, it’s also possible to get started by using the Newman library. They’ve developed integrations directly for a number of CI/CD providers. Postman provides two ways of accomplishing this. However, efficient teams may consider integrating load tests in their CI/CD pipelines directly, ensuring with every commit that the service still performs as expected. Integrating with CI/CDīeing able to run a load test locally is a great first step, and allows teams to verify the resilience of a service at a moment’s notice. Later in this blog post, in the section about implementation, you’ll see how mocks are actually created in Postman. While Stripe does offer a sandbox API specifically for testing, you can still run into rate-limiting issues, which is very likely to happen during a load test.

This service will, of course, need to handle payments, and in this imaginary case, your service is using Stripe. Imagine you’re running an e-commerce site with a microservice architecture and one of those microservices is the cart service. In fact, mock APIs can enhance your development experience in general.Ĭombining load testing and mocks is the best way of ensuring that you’re only load testing a single service. The use of mock servers can greatly enhance your load testing experience. Postman decided to implement this functionality with the Postman Collection Runner, which allows you to run requests from a Collection in a specified order. But without being able to generate a given number of requests at a time, it’s impossible to perform a load test. For the load test to work, you need to run all the tests at once to create a significant load.Īs you start working with load testing, you’ll find that the configurations can get very advanced and complex. However, there’s one feature you’ll find in every load testing tool: the ability to generate requests.

Load testing is an entire subject in itself. Because of this, some key features have been introduced, allowing users to verify performance and resilience as well. While this test scenario is still valid and useful, the team at Postman realized that many users were interested in a different use case: Postman performance testing. However, Postman was initially only meant to test API requests one at a time. Postman Collections, in particular, became one of the optimal tools for testing API requests during development, as Collections allow you to group requests together, such as all possible requests for a given API. The most common use case for Postman is to simply test or verify individual API requests. They also support SOAP, for those still working with that.

Postman’s load testing featuresĪs a tool to test APIs, Postman aims to test any type of API you might be working with and currently supports the three major protocols: REST, gRPC, and GraphQL. If not, you can find many great resources in the Postman Learning Center. In this post, it’s assumed that you have at least some experience working with Postman and are familiar with the basics of creating and sending requests. While using it for general API testing has widespread adoption, load testing using Postman is not so straightforward. Postman is highly popular in the testing tools space verifying API requests.

Postman load test vsts