Request Traces & Telemetry

Deep packet inspection, timing watermarks, wire vs disk bytes, and credential sanitation.

Table of Contents

1. Why Wire Telemetry Matters
2. The HttpTrace Data Structure
3. The Request Trace Inspector
4. Verifying Cache Hits vs Wire Downloads
   1. Fresh Cache Trace
   2. Warm Old Cache Trace
5. Automatic Redaction Verification
   1. Pro Tip: Detecting Accidental CDN Hits

---

Why Wire Telemetry Matters

Addressables hides HTTP operations behind high-level APIs like Addressables.DownloadDependenciesAsync(). While convenient for gameplay programming, this abstraction makes it difficult to diagnose network performance issues:

• Did the client request 4 small bundles concurrently or 1 large bundle sequentially?
• Did an unchanged bundle download over the wire, or did Unity resolve it from local cache?
• What was the exact Time-to-First-Byte (TTFB) for the remote catalog file?

PatchProof’s Request Trace Engine captures every raw HTTP interaction between the standalone client and the local staging origin.

---

The HttpTrace Data Structure

Defined in RunRecords.cs, each trace entry records a complete request-response transaction:

[Serializable]
public class HttpTrace
{
    public string url;                 // Sanitized URL path
    public string httpMethod;          // GET, HEAD, POST
    public int statusCode;             // 200, 206, 304, 404, 500
    public long wireBytes;             // Actual bytes sent over TCP socket
    public long decompressedBytes;     // Decompressed payload size
    public double durationMs;          // Request latency in milliseconds
    public string clientIp;            // 127.0.0.1
    public string faultInjected;       // None, AbortedAtOffset:131072, etc.
    public long timestampTicks;        // High-resolution timestamp
}

---

The Request Trace Inspector

In the Rehearsal Room window, clicking “View HTTP Request Traces” on any scenario tile opens the detailed trace timeline:

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Request Trace Inspector - Run: run_8f91c2a0 (FreshCache_CleanNetwork)                             |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| TIME   | METHOD | STATUS | WIRE BYTES | LATENCY | FAULT | URL PATH                                    |
|--------+--------+--------+------------+---------+-------+---------------------------------------------|
| 0.012s | GET    | 200 OK |      1,024 |    4ms  | None  | /content/v2.0.0/catalog_2026.10.22.hash     |
| 0.028s | GET    | 200 OK |     32,768 |   12ms  | None  | /content/v2.0.0/catalog_2026.10.22.bin      |
| 0.115s | GET    | 200 OK |  4,194,304 |   45ms  | None  | /content/v2.0.0/hero_knight_assets.bundle   |
| 0.180s | GET    | 200 OK |    524,288 |    8ms  | None  | /content/v2.0.0/shared_materials.bundle     |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| TOTALS: 4 Requests | Transferred: 4.75 MB | Total Transfer Time: 69ms | Cache Hits: 0             |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

---

Verifying Cache Hits vs Wire Downloads

When comparing a Fresh Cache run against a Warm Old Cache run:

Fresh Cache Trace

Every bundle required by the candidate release appears with Status: 200 OK and a positive Wire Bytes count matching the physical bundle file size.

Warm Old Cache Trace

1. The client requests the catalog hash (200 OK).
2. The client requests the catalog binary (200 OK).
3. For bundles that were unchanged between v1.0.0 and v2.0.0, zero HTTP requests appear in the trace.
4. The client’s runtime probe records a CacheHit event, confirming that Addressables loaded the existing archive directly from UnityEngine.Caching.
5. Only genuinely modified bundles are transferred over the wire.

---

Automatic Redaction Verification

PatchProof enforces strict privacy across all recorded traces. If a remote staging URL carries API keys, access signatures, or private bearer tokens:

• Pattern: (?i)(?:token|access_token|key|api_key|auth|signature|secret|sig)=[^&]+
• Replacement: [REDACTED]

Trace logs, exported JSON files, and HTML audit summaries never store unredacted credentials.

Pro Tip: Detecting Accidental CDN Hits

If a standalone player misconfiguration causes Addressables to bypass the local staging origin and attempt to contact a public CDN, the probe detects the external URI and logs an ExternalNetworkViolation alert.