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Ask HN: How to automate collecting HAR file while user is browsing

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Re: Ask HN: How to automate collecting HAR file while user is browsing

#11

Post by mcny »

sim7c00 wrote: post #7
sim7c00 wrote: post #6

commendable that you wanna go this way honestly. i see a lot of companies just push bullshit back onto users in the face of this type of intermittent client side issue. repeating same dumb questions until you give up. as some other commenter said, automating har files might not be ideal as it could collect much too much info, and browsers will make this very difficult to automate. perhaps you cam add client side logg…

for tje record ive been on zoom calls with companies and an issue would happen, not caputuring any debug data as we werent really looking into it. in the face of a recorded video of the issue they would still say, update browser, or send har file, and pretend like the issue never happened. recordings 'got lost' and issues never fixed. :') needless to say said vendors were booted out in favor of vendors with support w…

I've been on the other side of this with internal customers, being pressured to "close" tickets more quickly when I haven't even been able to diagnose the issue properly.

Re: Ask HN: How to automate collecting HAR file while user is browsing

#15

Post by lolinder »

This isn't a direct answer to your question, but be very careful with asking for HAR files. They're super convenient, but if your tech support doesn't understand that HAR files are the worst kind of PII you can get in big trouble.

I've seen HAR files containing Google account session tokens attached in plain text to Jira tickets. If you end up leaking those tokens your customers will not be amused.

See the Okta breach:

https://www.rezonate.io/blog/har-files-attack-okta-customers...

Re: Ask HN: How to automate collecting HAR file while user is browsing

#16

Post by geocar »

Is this a CSP thing? Can you get away with https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re... and window.onerror?

Also, do you actually need the HAR file? or just a log of your servers' inputs/outputs from the clients' perspective? You can get that The Boring Way if you don't have a CSP issue, so maybe solve that issue?

Re: Ask HN: How to automate collecting HAR file while user is browsing

#18

Post by dylan604 »

davidt84 wrote: post #5

As that's pretty much spying on the user, I don't think browsers make it easy to do that.

This is the kind of question that makes my spidey senses get all tingly. This happens more on SO than here though. It’s either you’re doing it wrong and just have no idea why this request is bad, or they know it’s bad and tried to phrase it in an innocent enough way to hopefully get an answer that would otherwise get ignored.
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