Analyse your web backend with BSOAD

Trying to debug the traffic around service-oriented architectures can be complex, which is why German company Qafoo have released BSOAD, the Browser SOA/HTTP Debugger. BSOAD can take traffic information gathered by the tcpdump command and analyse the HTTP traffic within that.

The developers created BSOAD after finding that similar tools like TShark (the Wireshark CLI) could capture the traffic but "omit important processing information and do not manage to process all HTTP interactions". BSOAD takes tcpdump output and parses the Ethernet frames for IP header information, then the TCP headers and then the actual data, applying TCP stream handling semantics to tidy the packet stream.

The display is the result of BSOAD working through TCP traffic data and extracting HTTP interactions

It then passes it to a parser – currently only a HTTP parser is available but others could be created – which extracts the HTTP interactions in the stream, including keep-alives, and outputs a JSON file. Finally, this information is passed to bdog, a node.js/web browser combination which is configured to display the HTTP interactions in an easy-to-read way which makes them useful for debugging purposes.

BSOAD is licensed under the AGPLv3 and is available to download from the project's GitHub repository.

(djwm)