Log http traffic for users over the internet

[Lars]

Hello,

First of all please excuse my ignorance in networking, my expertise is mainly application development.

Is it possible to monitor http traffic for a couple of clients that are not on my local network? I thought I can do something similar with Fiddler, but the Proxy that Fiddler creates seems to be exposed for LAN only, I can't configure it for my external (internet) IP address.

So, could anyone please just lead me to the right way, what do I need here? Should I host my own proxy server and then chain it with fiddler, and let the users use this proxy server? What is the best option?

A client is asking me to do this, they have some sort of a survey and they want to log all http activity for a couple of users over a period of time. So that's the main objective.

Thanks,

[Eric Lawrence]

Rules > Customize Rules > Connections > Allow Remote Computers to Connect will cause Fiddler to listen on all of the PC's network interfaces.

For that to make a difference to your scenario, your PC must be listening on a public IP and its public IP must not be firewalled.

Regards,
Eric Lawrence
Telerik

 

 

[Lars]

That means I can't achieve this on a desktop thats connected to a router. We're eventually going to rent a remote access windows server, do you reckon I can use fiddler directly on the remote server and let users connect to the Fiddler proxy (Allow Remote Computers to Connect)?

Also one more question if you don't mind, is there a way to uniquely identify devices in Fiddler? I tried to play with the Rules file and I was able to add a column to show client ip, but ip is not really a unique identifier.. I was hoping for a nic mac address or something like that.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer.

[Eric Lawrence]

If your router is configured to put your PC in a DMZ or perform port-forwarding, then presumably you can do this.

There are certainly folks that run Fiddler on Windows/Linux instances in the cloud (e.g. Azure).

If websites could uniquely identify devices, we wouldn't need cookies. Of course, that'd be a privacy/security nightmare. You can only get a remote IP's MAC address if you're directly connected to it, which is rarely the case in a given internet scenario.

If the client device cooperates, you could have your proxy return a HTTP/407 auth challenge and then the device would supply its ID as the proxy authentication response, but many devices and applications don't work well with HTTP/407s.

Regards,
Eric Lawrence
Telerik