Telerik Fiddler is the web developer’s best friend.
It does a wonderful job of telling you why it worked, or not. Its ability to edit and replay some requests is wonderful. That, with Advanced REST Client, both help you accomplish your day to day job.
It tracks everything.
Almost.
Sometimes, you need to track server-to-server requests. Example, if your app calls your back-end api, and then, your server needs to call Mandrill API to send an email to your customer.
By default, Fiddler is not tracking that request, that goes out from your server-side app. But, there’s a solution.
In fact, Fiddler track all web traffic generated by “you”, the user currently logged, and who started the fiddler app.
Now, knowing that, all you need to do, is make your IIS Pool run at your name.
By default, IIS uses “ApplicationPoolIdentity” user, it’s a kind of virtual user generated by the web engine, to run the app. Each pool have its own username.
But, you can change it to something else.
Open IIS. Go to the Application Pools section. Choose your app pool, then open Advanced Settings / Identity. Click the dots, choose Custom account, enter your credentials, and you’re done!
Now, your outgoing server-side calls from your back-end can be tracked in Fiddler!