Hey HN, we built Subtrace (https://subtrace.dev) to let you see all incoming and outgoing requests in your backend server—like Wireshark, but for Docker containers. It comes with a Chrome DevTools-like interface. Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsGa6ZwVxdA, and see our docs for examples: https://docs.subtrace.dev.

Subtrace lets you see every request with full payload, headers, status code, and latency details. Tools like Sentry and OpenTelemetry often leave out these crucial details, making prod debugging slow and annoying. Most of the time, all I want to see are the headers and JSON payload of real backend requests, but it's impossible to do that in today's tools without excessive logging, which just makes everything slower and more annoying.

Subtrace shows you every backend request flowing through your system. You can use simple filters to search for the requests you care about and inspect their details.

Internally, Subtrace intercepts all network-related Linux syscalls using Seccomp BPF so that it can act as a proxy for all incoming and outgoing TCP connections. It then parses HTTP requests out of the proxied TCP stream and sends them to the browser over WebSocket. The Chrome DevTools Network tab is already ubiquitous for viewing HTTP requests in the frontend, so we repurposed it to work in the browser like any other app (we were surprised that it's just a bunch of TypeScript).

Setup is just one command for any Linux program written in any language.

You can use Subtrace by adding a `subtrace run` prefix to your backend server startup command. No signup required. Try for yourself: https://docs.subtrace.dev

user:	thebabayaga29
created:	September 5, 2024
karma:	1