DEV Community

Cover image for DevTools for your Backend Server
Atchyut Pulavarthi
Atchyut Pulavarthi

Posted on

DevTools for your Backend Server

So, a few days back, I came across a thread on Twitter where a fellow developer was looking for a "Dev Tools" like offering for their backend micro-service. What they wanted was a Network Monitor that could give a segregated overview about the incoming requests & the responses the server was sending each time. Enterprises usually run with enterprise licenses for Monitoring tools such as NewRelic or Dynatrace which are really good at what they do, but the problem is that these are enterprise software offerings that cost a ton of money. There are other free and open source alternatives but they're usually somewhat bloated and using Wireshark is most likely going to be an overkill for this simple use case.

Anyway, the Supabase LaunchWeek 6 was right around the corner and I was wanting to check their platform out for quite some time now, so a colleague and I decided to build HTTP Sense for it.

HTTP Sense is a reverse proxy and network monitoring tool that provides comprehensive network monitoring for your backend servers and micro-services. It provides a secure and high-performance gateway that can be used to monitor incoming traffic. HTTP Sense's features include real-time traffic analysis, application-level filtering, user authentication, and more.

The best part is, you don't need to use an SDK or a library to integrate HTTP Sense into your project, in fact, you don't need to integrate HTTP Sense into your project. It is a simple reverse proxy that will accept HTTP requests on your server's behalf and forward it to your server, at the same time, it doubles down as a network monitor and provides a cool dashboard where you can view your network transactions in detail.

If you're interested in trying it out, please visit our website for detailed instructions on how to setup and use HTTPSense as a Reverse Proxy and Network Monitor.

Here's a few images of our dashboard:

Image description

Image description

We currently have added support for all incoming requests and will soon be adding support for outgoing requests as well. We're an open source project, so please feel free to try us out and also collaborate on HTTP Sense if you would like to. I'll keep posting here as we continue to develop this into a feature rich, free monitoring solution for all the devs out there.

Our Repository:
HTTP Sense Repository

Here's a preview of our tool:

You can follow me on Twitter at @tchyut_p

Top comments (0)