📊 Create a Monitor in AllThingsAPI (ATA)

Monitoring in AllThingsAPI (ATA) is a powerful feature that allows users to automate the execution of API Collections on a defined schedule. This ensures continuous testing of your APIs for availability, correctness, and performance. With monitors in place, you can detect issues early, ensuring your APIs remain functional and responsive, especially in production environments.

2️⃣ How API Collections and Monitors Work Together

A monitor in ATA is always based on an existing API Collection. Here’s how they work together:

API Collections define the API requests you want to test, along with any test scripts you have written.
When a monitor runs, ATA executes the requests from the selected collection.
The environment associated with the monitor injects any variables such as base_url, access_token, and other dynamic values.
The monitor also runs pre-request and post-response scripts exactly as they would in manual testing, ensuring consistency across automated and manual runs.

This integration allows you to reuse your test scripts and ensures that your monitoring reflects the same logic as your manual tests.

3️⃣ Creating a Monitor

Creating a monitor in ATA is easy and follows a few straightforward steps. Let’s go through the process:

Step 1: Navigate to Monitoring

From the ATA sidebar, go to API Testing Lab.
Select Monitoring.

This will bring you to the Monitor Dashboard, where you can view and manage all your monitors.

Step 2: Click “Create Monitor”

Click on the “Create Monitor” button to open the Monitor Configuration Wizard. This is where you will define all the monitor settings.

Step 3: Monitor Setup

In the wizard, you’ll need to fill in the following fields:

Field	Description
Monitor Name	Give your monitor a meaningful name (e.g., “Production Health Monitor”).
API Collection	Choose an existing API collection from your workspace that you want to monitor.
Environment	Select an environment (e.g., “Production”, “Staging”) that defines the dynamic variables (like `base_url`, `access_token`) used in the API collection.

Step 4: Configure Scheduling

Scheduling defines when and how often the monitor should run.

Option	Description
Frequency	Choose how often you want the monitor to run (e.g., every 5 minutes, hourly, daily).
Start Time	Set the exact time the monitor should start.
Days of the Week	Choose specific days of the week to run the monitor (e.g., Monday–Friday, or during business hours).

Why Scheduling Matters:

It ensures 24/7 health checks for your APIs.
It allows monitoring after deployments or during peak hours.
It helps detect time-sensitive failures, such as expired tokens or timeouts.

Step 5: Configure Retry on Failure

Sometimes API failures are temporary due to network issues, server errors, or other transient conditions. Retrying a failed monitor run can help avoid false alarms.

Option	Description
Enable Retry	Toggle this on to allow retries for failed monitor runs.
Retry Count	Choose how many retries should be attempted (1–3 retries).
Retry Delay	Set the delay between retries (e.g., 30 seconds).

What Retries Cover:

Temporary network issues.
Transient server errors (e.g., 502, 503).
Authentication token delays or missed heartbeats.

Example Benefit: If a monitor runs at 10:00 AM and gets a 502 Bad Gateway error, ATA will wait 30 seconds and retry. If the second attempt is successful, no failure alert will be triggered.

Step 6: Set Notifications and Alerts

You can configure notifications so that you are alerted whenever a monitor fails.

Option	Description
Email Notifications	Receive alerts when the monitor fails, sent directly to your team’s email.
Webhook Integrations	Send alerts to Slack, Microsoft Teams, or your custom systems (if configured).
Failure Criteria	Choose the conditions under which notifications are sent (e.g., assertion failures, connection errors, request timeouts).

This ensures your team is always informed and can take action before users experience issues.

4️⃣ Why Monitoring is Important

Monitoring your APIs regularly offers several key benefits:

Catches issues early — before they impact users.
Saves time — automates routine testing and avoids manual checks.
Ensures reliability — APIs are continuously monitored to ensure they perform as expected.
Boosts confidence — your team can trust that the APIs are functioning properly and be alerted if something goes wrong.

Creating and managing monitors in ATA is an effective way to automate API testing, ensuring continuous health checks and immediate alerts when things go wrong. By scheduling regular tests, leveraging retry logic, and setting up notifications, you can keep your APIs functioning smoothly and address issues before they affect your users.

Happy monitoring! 🚀