Browser SOA / HTTP Debugger

We just released a tool, which we developed internally to be able to debug complex HTTP based SOA stacks (REST). It offers the same listening capabilities like Wireshark, but displays the HTTP requests in a far more readable way and makes it easy to reproduce single requests.

Wireshark is great for debugging network issues, but if there are multiple requests between different webservices involved, it gets really, really hard to follow those requests. Since we are helping quite some of our clients with more complex SOA architectures, which sometimes require debugging, we came up with a tool that works better for us: BSOAD. And we just push'ed it to Github.

There are other solutions available, which are based on (HTTP) Proxies. Sadly it is not always easy to reconfigure all involved services to use those proxies, and the proxy-configuration might get tedious with a lot of services. Also solutions using stuff like LD_PRELOAD are often a hassle to maintain. Since BSOAD is based on TCPDump, which logs the TCP packets originating directly from the kernel this is an entirely non-invasive solution.

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The Goal

The goal of BSOAD is to provide you with a good overview on all HTTP interactions in the system you are inspeciting over a given time span. In addition, it should be easily possible to exactly reproduce single requests for debugging purposes. This is what BSOAD gains you.