Hello!
Today I'd like to introduce what I've used to understand how Mackerel communications work with the Mackerel API. It's actually really simple, thanks to the flexibility of mackerel-agent's configuration.
First, I set up Fiddler Web Debugger, a very useful (and free!) tool that I have used for many projects in the past. It serves as a proxy server that you can manipulate and debug traffic with.
Inside your mackerel-agent.conf (I've put mine at the top), put this:
http_proxy = "http://proxy.example.com:8080"
apibase = "http://api.mackerelio.com"
We are removing SSL to get it to proxy properly without doing strange things with installing a self-signed SSL on the system, and then re-adding it with Fiddler.
To do this, let's add the following AutoResponder rule in Fiddler:
Match: regex:^(ix)http://api.mackerelio.com/(.*)$
Respond with: https://api.mackerelio.com/$1
You can also import this rule by saving the following content into a Fiddler AutoResponder Export file (.farx) and importing it from the AutoResponder menu:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<AutoResponder LastSave="2018-09-07T11:30:18.2557112-04:00" FiddlerVersion="5.0.20181.14850">
<State Enabled="true" Fallthrough="true" UseLatency="false">
<ResponseRule Match="regex:^(?ix)http://api.mackerelio.com/(.*)$" Action="https://api.mackerelio.com/$1" Enabled="true" />
</State>
</AutoResponder>
Restart mackerel-agent and it will take effect immediately.
Congratulations! Now you can watch mackerel-agent as it talks to the server. You can also (if desired) modify the messages going to Mackerel for testing purposes.
To disable this, simply comment out (prefix with #) or remove the lines in mackerel-agent.conf, and restart mackerel-agent.
I would not recommend sending your Mackerel data (which includes your API key) unencrypted over the Internet, so please do this within your internal infrastructure (private network) only.