Internet browsing has become a necessity for majority of internet-enabled users these days. We search internet for a lot of purposes starting from searching a lost school friend, expanding knowledge horizons, researching about a particular stuff, etc., online jobs and meetings etc. Especially with this pandemic (which it is not as per definition), we all have started meeting people online and our jobs and businesses are relying over internet now. While doing all these, we come across a situation where either a website does not load, or page does not get refreshed or some other sort of issues.
Being in such situation is annoying and we want to fix this as soon as possible and we catch up with our IT folks. Most of the times, they ask us for web traffic logs to investigate further. There are quiet a few tools available that we can leverage to capture web traffic, and some of them might also capture and pass our credentials. There is a safe way to avoid this. This blog is to demonstrate this to you.
Most of the internet browsers available today, have \”debugger mode\” which we are going to utilize. How? Let\’s find it out….
- Open an Internet browser in incognito or private mode (keyboard shortcut – CTRL+SHIFT+P). Incognito or private mode is suggested to avoid cache files and your web page will load fresh.
- Hit F12 key on your keyboard which shall pop up a pane, mostly on right side or bottom part of the page.
- Next, in the new pane that come up, look for \”Network\” tab, and enable \”Preserve Log\” and \”Disable Cache\”. This is very important step to do before you do anything.
- Now navigate the page that has issue or reproduce the issue, and you will see internet traffic is getting captured.
- Once you have done with reproducing the issue, in the right pane, using your mouse , do right click on the captured traffic, which shall open some menu options. Select last option which reads \”Save all as HAR with content\”. This will let you save your traffic wherever you wish to. Beauty of this process is, it does not capture any of your credentials, and you do not need to worry about it.