📊 How to Instantly Run a Monitor, View Results, and Track Health in ATA

Once you’ve created and scheduled a monitor in AllThingsAPI (ATA), it’s essential to keep track of its performance, view the results, and monitor the health of your API workflows over time. ATA provides a user-friendly Monitoring Dashboard to make this process easy. You can run monitors instantly, track results, analyze performance with graphs, and track overall monitor health.

1️⃣ Instantly Run a Monitor

Even though monitors are typically scheduled to run at set intervals, ATA gives you the flexibility to trigger a run immediately, whenever you need it.

Steps to Run a Monitor Instantly:

Navigate to Monitoring: Go to API Testing Lab → Monitoring from the left-hand panel.
Select the Dashboard Tab: Once you’re in the Monitoring section, click on the Dashboard tab.
Choose Your Monitor: Click on the monitor you wish to run instantly.
Select “Run Now”: Click the “Run now” button to trigger the monitor immediately.

This will run the monitor using the current collection, environment, and configurations you’ve set. It’s useful when:

You’ve just updated an API and want to test the changes.
You’re debugging a failure and want to rerun the monitor quickly.
You need a fresh test result without waiting for the next scheduled run.

ATA will log the run like any other scheduled execution, and the results will be stored for later review.

2️⃣ View Monitor Execution Results

After the monitor has run (either immediately or on schedule), ATA allows you to view the results in detail. This gives you insight into how your API performed during the test.

Steps to View Results:

Navigate to Monitoring: Go to Monitoring from the ATA sidebar.
Click on the Monitor Name: Select the monitor whose results you want to review.
Open the “Run History” Tab: Once inside the monitor details, go to the Run History tab.

Here, you’ll find:

A list of all monitor runs with timestamps.
Pass/Fail status for each run.
Error messages (if any errors occurred during the run).
Logs for each request and test script executed during the run.

If you triggered the monitor instantly, it will appear at the top of the list.

3️⃣ Analyze Using Visual Graphs

To help you quickly understand your monitor’s performance over time, ATA provides visual graphs and reports for each monitor. These visuals allow you to spot patterns, performance trends, and failure causes.

Types of Graphs Available:

Pass vs Fail Over Time: A timeline showing the number of successful and failed runs, helping you track the overall performance trend of your API.
Response Time Trends: This graph helps you spot performance slowdowns by tracking response times across multiple monitor runs.
Status Code Distribution: See the distribution of HTTP status codes returned by your API, helping you identify if non-200 responses are appearing frequently.
Failure Reasons: Breaks down the types of failures that occurred (timeouts, test failures, 500 errors, etc.), helping you diagnose common issues in your API.

These visuals make it easy to:

Spot recurring issues (e.g., failures at specific times).
Identify unstable endpoints that require attention.
Track how recent changes (e.g., deployments or configuration updates) affect reliability.

ATA may also provide filters to adjust the time range or focus on specific failure types, allowing for more granular analysis.

4️⃣ Track the Overall Health of a Monitor

Monitoring your API’s health is about understanding how consistently it passes over time. ATA provides a set of tools to track the stability and performance of your monitors.

Key Metrics to Track:

Uptime Rate: The percentage of successful monitor runs over a given period. This metric gives you a clear indication of how reliable your API is.
Error Patterns: Identify consistent failures at specific times (e.g., daily at midnight), which may point to recurring issues like server overload or authentication failures.
Test Stability: Analyze whether the same assertions (e.g., response code checks or field presence) are failing repeatedly, indicating potential issues in the API logic or infrastructure.

By regularly checking these insights, you can take early action, such as:

Fixing unstable APIs before they cause significant issues.
Updating environments or tokens before they expire.
Improving test coverage for edge cases to ensure your API performs well under all conditions.

ATA’s monitoring feature allows you to automate API testing, view test results instantly, analyze performance trends, and track overall monitor health. By leveraging visual graphs, historical data, and health metrics, you can gain deeper insights into your API’s reliability and take proactive steps to ensure it runs smoothly.

With monitoring, you move from reacting to failures to preventing them—keeping your APIs available, functional, and performant.

Happy monitoring! 🚀