Welcome! 👋

Postman Insights is designed to let you optimize your API performance in real time. Using the drop-in Postman Insights Agent, you can bring your API endpoints into Postman and assess your API traffic. Postman Insights allows you to create collections based on the endpoints you're interested in the most, so you can visually inspect your API productivity and fix any errors that may occur.

Postman is working toward the open launch of Postman Insights. Today, the alpha release enables you to leverage the Postman Insights Agent on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) deployments. Within 15 minutes of installing the Postman Insights Agent in staging or production, you'll start to see endpoints. The Postman Insights Agent will keep these endpoints up to date based on new observed traffic and its errors, latency, and volume.

We're excited for you to try out the new features and give us your feedback so we can continue tailoring the product to your needs.

About this repo | Running this repo

About this repo

This is the open-source repository for the community version of the Postman Insights Agent, and is intended for use with Postman. This community version of the Postman Insights Agent does not include functionality for inferring types and data formats. This functionality is available only in the postman-insights-agent binary that we distribute.

Running this repo

How to build

Running the following commands will generate the postman-insights-agent binary:

1. Install Go 1.18 or above.
2. Install libpcap
   • For Homebrew on mac: brew install libpcap
   • For Ubuntu/Debian: apt-get install libpcap-dev
3. make

How to test

1. Install gomock: go get github.com/golang/mock/mockgen
2. make test

HTTPS capture (eBPF)

In addition to plaintext HTTP capture (classic BPF via libpcap), the agent can capture decrypted HTTPS traffic using eBPF uprobes on TLS libraries. This is opt-in and Linux-only.

• Enable it by passing --enable-https-capture to apidump.
• Related flags: --https-capture-mode, and the HTTPS rate/body-size caps.
• Requirements: Linux kernel 5.8+ (RHEL/CentOS/Rocky/Alma 8 with 4.18 is supported via Red Hat's eBPF backports). Requires CAP_BPF + CAP_PERFMON (or CAP_SYS_ADMIN on older kernels) and access to /sys/kernel/debug, /sys/fs/bpf, and host /proc.
• Not available on macOS — the macOS build captures HTTP only; all eBPF paths compile to no-ops there.

Building with eBPF requires the insights_bpf build tag plus clang and bpf2go, and a vmlinux.h generated from the build host's kernel BTF (produced automatically at build time; requires a native per-arch Linux build). On Linux with clang + bpftool installed, make auto-detects the toolchain and builds with eBPF; otherwise it builds the plain binary. See ebpf/programs/README.md for details.