Rootly Built AI-Ready APIs with Postman

“In the agentic era, API scale and reliability aren't a backend concern. They're the product.”

JJ Tang, CEO, Rootly

Rootly exists to keep other companies' systems reliable, which leaves no room for its own to be shaky. Customers rely on the platform to help prevent and resolve incidents, so any failure within Rootly's own APIs represents the very problem the company exists to solve.

At the same time, software development was changing. As customers rapidly adopted AI-driven and agentic workflows, APIs became the operational layer powering not only developer integrations but also intelligent agents like Rootly AI SRE. As the team puts it, even when the conversation is about MCP, every interaction ultimately resolves to an API.

That created a new engineering challenge.

Generative AI dramatically accelerated software development, enabling engineers to build and iterate faster than ever before. But traditional quality practices, particularly manual code reviews and disconnected testing workflows, could no longer keep up with that velocity.

Rootly couldn't afford to lower its standards. Instead, it needed a new way to maintain and improve them.

Rather than relying on people to catch every issue, the team sifted quality into the software development lifecycle itself through automated testing, version-controlled APIs, and standardized validation. The goal was to move faster and ensure every API remained trusted, governed, and reliable as both developer and AI adoption continued to grow.

Rootly couldn't afford to compromise on reliability. Instead, the team needed to operationalize quality, embedding validation directly into the software development lifecycle. The goal was to ensure that as developer and AI adoption exploded, every API remained trusted, governed, and accessible. This required more than just another testing tool; Rootly needed a strategic platform that could unify API collaboration, documentation, and governance—a foundation that would accelerate velocity, not throttle it.

“The mandate wasn't 'move fast and break things.' It was move fast and not break things, and Postman allows us to do this with confidence.”

Dan Sadler, VP Engineering, Rootly

Rootly wasn't looking to replace its existing testing stack. It already had comprehensive automated API testing running within its CI pipelines. What the team needed was a shared platform that could bring API collaboration, testing, validation, and documentation together without adding friction to the software development lifecycle.

Postman became that platform.

Adoption began organically within the QA organization, where many engineers already trusted Postman as the industry-standard platform for working with APIs. Its intuitive experience, enterprise-ready reliability, and seamless integration alongside Rootly's existing CI workflows enabled teams to adopt it quickly without disrupting how software was built or shipped.

As adoption expanded, Postman evolved from an individual developer tool into Rootly's shared API platform.

Through shared workspaces and standardized collections, Rootly established a single source of truth for API behavior across engineering. Collections were organized by product feature rather than individual contributors, giving developers a consistent, collaborative way to validate API changes throughout development. Engineers now run standardized collections before code progresses through the delivery pipeline, receiving immediate feedback through response validation and regression checks while reducing dependency on QA for routine verification.

The impact extended well beyond testing. Shared collections became reusable engineering assets that accelerated developer onboarding, standardized API knowledge across teams, and enabled engineers to confidently self-serve during development.

“Reusable collections act as a living reference for expected API behavior, helping catch regressions earlier and preventing issues from reaching later release stages.”

Quentin Rousseau, CTO, Rootly

By centralizing API collaboration, validation, and documentation within Postman, Rootly established a scalable foundation for API quality that enables developers to move faster while ensuring every API remains trusted, consistent, and ready for both human developers and AI-powered applications.

As Rootly's investment in AI accelerated, so did its use of Postman.

The team began exploring Agent Mode to automate the repetitive work surrounding APIs, including generating tests, expanding test coverage, and keeping collections and documentation up to date. Rather than replacing engineers, Agent Mode allows developers to spend more time solving complex reliability challenges while AI handles routine API development tasks.

“Agent Mode takes the repetitive parts of API work—generating tests, improving coverage, and keeping collections and documentation current—and lets the agent handle them. The same way our own AI SRE takes on the opening work of an incident, Agent Mode takes on the routine work of API development.”

Dan Sadler, VP Engineering, Rootly

Postman's impact extended beyond internal engineering. Rootly chose Postman as the public home for its product APIs and AI Labs initiatives, including its MCP servers, creating a single destination where developers and AI builders can discover, explore, and immediately begin working with its APIs. Supported by Run in Postman buttons throughout its GitHub repositories, Postman now serves as both Rootly's internal collaboration platform and its external API storefront.

For Rootly, Postman has become much more than a platform for API testing. It has become the foundation for how the company builds, governs, and distributes APIs in the agentic era.

The clearest sign of that transformation is who now depends on Rootly's APIs.

Today, Rootly AI SRE relies on those APIs in production to retrieve operational context, analyze incidents, and take action. APIs are no longer serving only developers; they have become the operational layer powering AI agents.

That shift fundamentally changes what's required of an API.

As AI agents become one of the platform's most demanding consumers, APIs must be consistently versioned, accurately documented, thoroughly validated, and governed so they remain trusted by both humans and machines. Postman provides the shared platform that allows Rootly to maintain that standard through specification-driven development, collaborative workspaces, standardized collections, and a single source of truth for API behavior.

The value extends well beyond engineering.

By publishing both its commercial APIs and AI Labs projects through Postman, Rootly discovered an unexpected advantage. The platform where engineers already collaborated internally naturally became the place where developers, and increasingly AI builders, discover, evaluate, and adopt Rootly's APIs.

Adoption has become one of Rootly's north-star metrics, making Postman not only its collaboration platform, but also one of its most important distribution channels.

“Postman is where the developer community discovers and adopts our APIs, and adoption is our north-star metric, so it's a distribution channel, not just a testing tool.”

Sylvain Kalache, Head of AI Labs, Rootly

That evolution is reshaping the business itself.

Historically, SaaS value was measured by the number of people using the software. Increasingly, however, value is created by intelligent agents operating through APIs. When Rootly AI SRE handles the opening minutes of an incident, the work isn't performed by a person navigating a user interface but by an AI agent orchestrating trusted API interactions at machine speed.

Supporting that future requires APIs capable of operating at agent scale, handling dramatically higher throughput while remaining versioned, secure, auditable, and reliable. For Rootly, where reliability is the product, that standard is non-negotiable.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was where that journey led.

When Rootly first adopted Postman, the goal was to improve API collaboration and testing. What the team didn't anticipate was that Postman would become the platform where both developers and AI agents discover, consume, and build on its APIs.

For Rootly, Postman is no longer just where APIs are tested. It's where they're built, governed, discovered, and ultimately transformed into products that power both developers and AI.

“Postman moved early on the shift to agentic development, first through MCP and then with Agent Mode. What we didn't anticipate was that the platform we’d already standardized on for API collaboration would also become the place where developers—and now AI agents—discover and consume our APIs. That distribution advantage in the AI era is something we simply couldn’t have predicted when we first partnered with Postman.”

Sylvain Kalache, Head of AI Labs, Rootly