Debugging API is still painful

Georgi Hristov — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:53:57 +0000

Note: The image above is AI-generated to illustrate the idea.

Debugging APIs across environments is messy.

Logs are scattered
Responses differ between dev/staging
Errors like 401 appear with no clear reason

What I wanted
A simple way to:

See all requests in one place
Open a request and inspect it
Quickly understand failures

Also useful
Comparing the same request between environments.
You immediately see what’s different.

Built this as a small ASP.NET Core tool for myself.

Curious how others handle this problem.

Debugging HTTP Requests in ASP.NET Core Across Environments

Georgi Hristov — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 04:47:46 +0000

When the same HTTP request works in dev but fails in production, debugging gets messy fast.

Example: a request returns 200 in dev but 400 in prod because of a missing header or slightly different payload—and it’s not obvious why.

Most of the time, this means jumping between logs, Postman, and custom middleware, trying to spot the difference.

To simplify this, I started working on a lightweight way to capture and inspect HTTP requests and responses directly inside the app (headers, body, timing).

The idea is simple: capture everything in one place and compare requests across environments to quickly see what changed.

It’s still early stage, and I’m exploring better comparison and visualization.

How do you debug these cases today?

If you want to check it out:
GitHub: https://github.com/georgidhristov/DebugProbe.AspNetCore
NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/DebugProbe.AspNetCore

DEV Community: Georgi Hristov

Debugging API is still painful

Debugging HTTP Requests in ASP.NET Core Across Environments