Redirect Tracing for DevOps Teams

You deploy a new build on Friday afternoon. Monitoring looks green. Monday morning, the SEO team reports that half the marketing pages are stuck in redirect loops. The redirect rules in your Nginx config, your CDN edge rules, and your application layer are all fighting each other--and nobody caught it because nobody traced the full chain.

Redirects in modern infrastructure are not simple. They happen at multiple layers, managed by different teams, configured in different systems. When something breaks, figuring out where in the stack the problem lives is the hard part.

The DevOps Redirect Problem

Redirect rules accumulate across your infrastructure like sediment. Each layer adds its own logic, and the interactions between layers are rarely tested end-to-end.

• Deployment changes break redirects. A new release updates route handling. Old redirect rules that depended on the previous routing structure silently stop working or create unexpected chains.
• Load balancer redirect configs. Your ALB or reverse proxy handles some redirects. Your app handles others. Your CDN rewrites URLs too. When these layers disagree, users get loops or land on the wrong page.
• Redirect rules scattered across servers, CDNs, and apps. Rules live in Nginx configs, Cloudflare page rules, Vercel rewrites, application middleware, and .htaccess files. No single place shows you what actually happens when a request hits your domain.
• No redirect validation in CI/CD. You test application logic, run unit tests, check for regressions--but redirect behavior is almost never part of the pipeline. Misconfigurations ship to production undetected.

What Broken Redirects Cost DevOps Teams

A redirect loop means a hard outage for affected URLs. Users see error pages. Crawlers give up. And because the root cause can live in any layer of the stack, debugging takes hours of header inspection and config review. Meanwhile, every minute of downtime on a revenue-generating URL has a real cost. Even subtle issues--a 302 where a 301 should be, an extra hop through a legacy domain--compound over time.

The Solution

Redirect Tracer shows you exactly what happens to an HTTP request as it passes through every layer of your stack.

How DevOps Teams Use Redirect Tracer

Post-deployment validation. After every deploy, run your critical URLs through Redirect Tracer. Compare the chain against expected behavior. If a new hop appeared or a status code changed, you know something in the release altered redirect logic.

Infrastructure debugging. When a redirect issue is reported, trace the URL to see exactly where in the chain the problem occurs. Headers reveal whether the redirect comes from your CDN, load balancer, or application server.

Migration verification. Moving from one hosting provider to another, changing CDNs, or restructuring DNS? Trace URLs before and after to confirm redirect behavior is preserved. One misconfigured edge rule can break thousands of paths.

Pre-production smoke tests. Trace URLs against staging environments to validate redirect rules before they go live. Catch issues in QA instead of production.

Pricing

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