With a collection and an environment in place, you can hand them to a monitor. Postman then owns the running of it — on a schedule, from its own infrastructure, whether or not your laptop is open. The New monitor form sets it all up in one screen; after that you'll tune a single advanced setting.
Create the monitor
This is the moment the collection stops being something you run by hand. The New monitor form is a single screen — most of it is sensible defaults, so you're mostly confirming: name the monitor, point it at your collection and environment, set a schedule, and turn on failure alerts, all before you click Create Monitor.
- Click the Services tab in the left sidebar.
- Click +, then select Monitor from the dropdown list.
- Enter the Monitor name:
- For Collection, select Coffee API Health Check.
- For Environment, select Monitoring — without it,
{{baseUrl}}can't resolve in the cloud and every run errors. - Under Run method, leave Schedule selected (it's the default) and pick a frequency from the dropdowns — Every hour or Every day at a fixed time both work on any plan.
- Leave Runners on Auto-select — Postman picks one for you. Choosing specific regions by hand requires a paid plan, and one runner is plenty here.
- Under Notifications, keep Receive email notifications for run failures and errors checked and enter your email address (up to five recipients). Leave the consecutive-failure limit at 3 so a permanently broken endpoint doesn't flood your inbox.
- Click Create Monitor.
Choose your interval from what the API is for, not from what feels thorough:
| Interval | Good for |
|---|---|
| Every 5 minutes | Public status pages and revenue-critical endpoints (paid plans only) |
| Every hour | Most production APIs |
| Every day | Internal or low-traffic services |
| Every week | Rarely-changing endpoints and smoke checks |
Once a failing monitor passes again, Postman sends a recovery email. Prefer chat over email? Check Notify a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel or chat and connect your workspace.
Expected outcome: The monitor appears under Monitors in the Services sidebar with an Unknown status — an empty circle just means it hasn't run yet, not that anything is wrong.
Troubleshooting: Monitors don't support OAuth 2.0 authentication. This collection needs no auth at all, so you shouldn't hit that here — but keep it in mind for your own APIs.
You can also create a monitor with the Postman API if you'd rather automate it.
Set a request timeout
Monitors run their requests in order, never in parallel, and a run that's still going when the next one is due will block it. A request timeout puts a ceiling on that, so one hung endpoint can't quietly create gaps in your monitoring history.
- With your monitor open, click More actions > Edit.
- Go to Advanced Settings.
- Select Set request timeout and enter a value in milliseconds:
10000- Click Update Monitor.
While you're in Advanced Settings, it's worth knowing what the other options do:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Retry if run fails | Re-runs a failed request automatically to absorb transient blips. Counts extra requests toward your usage. |
| Set request timeout | Caps how long the whole run may take. Max 10 minutes (600000 ms) on Free, 15 minutes (900000 ms) on paid plans. |
| Set delay before requests | Inserts a pause before each request, for rate-limited APIs. |
| Follow redirects | On by default — the monitor follows HTTP redirects. |
| Enable SSL validation | On by default. Turn off only for self-signed certificates. |
Caution: The timeout applies to the entire monitor run, including every request, response, and script — not per request. Don't set it lower than the run realistically needs.