HTTP communication monitoring on OS X

http macos monitoring

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Solution 1

Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

Runs on JAVA. Available on OSX, Linux and Windows.

Solution 2

I like TcpCatcher. It is free and 100% java based so it works fine on Mac OS X. Not only, you will be able to monitor HTTP communication but you will also be able to change requests / responses on the fly which opens very interesting possibilities.. There is a dedicated tutorial on capturing iPhone's HTTP communication.

Solution 3

If you're looking to trace application traffic, Wireshark is the best tool I've found - it can log and decode HTTP and many other protocols, and the GUI's search tools make finding the messages you're interesting in pretty quick and painless.

Other reasons I recommend this:

It's quick to install
It captures traffic straight from the network card, there is no need to change the application or set up proxies etc. It'll even read dumps captured from tcpdump and similar tools offline
It's multi-platform (works on Windows/Mac/Linux and others)
It's open source

Solution 4

You could also use dTrace to monitor in even more detail, if that's what you need.

Solution 5

I second using Charles, it's a really excellent tool for HTTP examination. When used with the iPhone simulator (or any other OS X application) Charles automatically sets up the system settings to use itself as a proxy so you only have to launch and run. It also is very easy to examine the traffic in a few different ways, and has a very lenient free trial version that is fully featured (time limited to an hour with a few nag screens) so you can give it a good try.

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