How to get a ‘Request Trace’ in Azure API Management

This blog post is a no-nonsense guide to acquire a Request Trace in Azure API Management. A Request Trace is a JSON document that contains valuable information about a request/response sent to API’s exposed through Azure API Management. You can use the Request Trace for debugging and troubleshooting your APIs.

Two-Step Quick Guide

You can obtain the Request Trace in two easy steps.

Step 1: In your request…

Add this header to your HTTP request:

Ocp-Apim-Trace: true

Step 2: In your response…

Your HTTP response now contains a response header called Ocp-Apim-Trace-Location:

Ocp-Apim-Trace-Location: https://apimXXXYYYZZZ.blob.core.windows.net/apiinspectorcontainer/XXXYYYZXZZ

What is inside a Request Trace?

A request trace is a JSON document that consists of trace-information collected through an API request. This JSON document is divided into ‘request trace sections’ and ‘request trace log entries’.

Request trace sections (sometimes also referred to as policy sections): “inbound”, “backend”, and “output”.

Each ‘request trace section’ contains an array of ‘request trace log entries’.

Each log entry contains:

• Source: this is the name of the policy that produced the log entry
• Timestamp: the time when the specific steps started execution
• Elapsed: the time it takes for a step to be processed
• Data: various data and information attached to the log entry