Everything in this module lives in one workspace, which keeps your monitor, collection, and environment together and makes them easy to find later. Monitors are visible to everyone in the workspace they belong to, so a dedicated workspace also keeps this practice run separate from real work.

1. Open the Postman desktop app. If you don't have it yet, download Postman and sign in — if you're already signed in, you're good to go.
2. Click Workspaces in the top navigation → Create.
3. On the Create your workspace form, in Workspace name enter [Your name] - API Monitoring (e.g. Danny - API Monitoring).

4. For Who can access, open the dropdown and choose Only you and invited people — Internal is already selected.
5. Leave the template on Blank workspace (already selected), then click Create Workspace.

Your new workspace opens automatically. You should see an empty sidebar with no collections yet.

Troubleshooting: If validation fails, check that your workspace name ends with - API Monitoring (with the hyphen) and that you created it yourself rather than joining someone else's.

A monitor is only as useful as the assertions inside the collection it runs. A request with no tests will pass forever, even when the API returns garbage — so this step builds two requests that each check a status code. You'll point them at the free Sample APIs coffee endpoints, which need no authentication.

Create the collection

1. Confirm you're in your API Monitoring workspace (check the name in the top-left).
2. In the left sidebar, click + → Collection.
3. Name it:

Add your first request

4. In the left sidebar, select Coffee API Health Check, click ⋯ (View more actions) → Add request. If the collection is already expanded, click Add request directly under it instead.
5. Name the request Get Hot Coffee, leave the method as GET, and paste this URL into the address bar:

{{baseUrl}}/coffee/hot

6. A monitor only fails when a test fails — without one, this request always passes even when the API is broken. Open the Scripts tab, select Post-response, and add:

pm.test("Status code is 200", function () {
    pm.response.to.have.status(200);
});

Add your second request

7. Add another request to Coffee API Health Check.
8. Name it Get Iced Coffee, leave the method as GET, and paste this URL:

{{baseUrl}}/coffee/iced

9. Important: Select Get Iced Coffee, open Scripts → Post-response, and paste the same test from step 6. Every request needs its own copy — an untested request always passes, so the monitor would never catch a failure on this endpoint.
10. Save both requests.

Prefer to let AI do the typing? Open Agent Mode and paste this prompt:

Expected outcome: Two requests in the collection, each showing a Scripts tab with one post-response test. The requests won't send successfully yet — {{baseUrl}} is unresolved until the next step.

Monitors run in the Postman cloud, not on your machine, so every value the collection depends on has to travel with it. Putting baseUrl in an environment lets you point the same collection at staging or production later by swapping the environment on the monitor.

1. In the left sidebar, click + next to Environments to create a new environment.
2. Name it:

3. Add a variable named baseUrl. If you don't see a Shared Value column, click the ⋯ menu at the far right of the variables table header, then under Show as column, check Shared Value.
4. In the Shared Value column, enter:

https://api.sampleapis.com

5. Click Save.
6. Select Monitoring from the environment selector in the top right, then open Get Hot Coffee and click Send to confirm you get a 200 OK with a JSON array of coffees.