---
title: "How to Do Full-Text Search Across All Application Traffic with Speedscale | Speedscale"
description: "This how-to video shows how to use Speedscale's full-text traffic search to instantly find where a specific piece of data appears as it flows through your."
canonical: "https://speedscale.com/blog/how-to-do-full-text-search-across-all-application-traffic-with-speedscale/"
---

![How to Do Full-Text Search Across All Application Traffic with Speedscale](https://speedscale.com/_astro/search-results-1440.D63tAzlL_28VTsW.webp)

# How to Do Full-Text Search Across All Application Traffic with Speedscale

Jan 9, 2026

[By Matt LeRay](https://speedscale.com/blog/author/matt-leray/)

[Observability](https://speedscale.com/blog/category/observability/)

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## Overview

Modern DevOps observability tools are excellent for monitoring system health, tracking distributed traces, and aggregating metrics. However, they lack the fidelity needed for **full-text search** across application traffic. While observability platforms excel at showing _what_ happened and _when_, they often fall short when you need to find _where_ a specific piece of data (like an email address, user ID, or transaction token) appears as it flows through your entire application stack.

**Speedscale’s full-text traffic search** solves this gap by enabling you to instantly search across all recorded network traffic, all **without needing prior instrumentation, tracing, or logging**. Unlike traditional search tools that only work on human-readable text, Speedscale searches both readable content and wire-format binary protocols including gRPC, Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Kafka, and others. Speedscale automatically decodes these binary formats into searchable text, and even opens encoded content like JWTs to search deep into claims and other nested structures. This capability is invaluable for debugging because it lets you trace data flows across service boundaries, investigate production incidents retroactively, and understand how specific values propagate through your system even when you didn’t anticipate needing to search for them.

Watch [this video](https://youtu.be/jJjQhjpFv9A) to understand more.

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## What Problem This Solves

Traditional observability tools require:

*   previously defined traces
*   specific log fields
*   planned annotations

But during real incidents:

*   you can’t predict what data you’ll need
*   you can’t log _everything_
*   encoded or binary data is hard to inspect

**Speedscale solves this by recording real network traffic and making it fully searchable.**

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## What Speedscale Can Search

Speedscale automatically:

*   Records network traffic (Layer 7)
*   Decodes and normalizes protocols into JSON
*   Performs **full-text search**, even inside encoded data

Supported decoding includes:

*   HTTP headers and bodies
*   JWTs (claims are decoded automatically)
*   gRPC
*   Kafka
*   PostgreSQL / MySQL
*   Other supported binary protocols

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## Step-by-Step: How to Search Your Traffic

💡 Tip

\*\* Note:\*\* Speedscale records traffic directly from your **local desktop** or from **remote environments** such as Kubernetes and many others. Whether you’re testing locally or capturing production traffic, Speedscale adapts to your workflow.

[See the Getting Started guide for full installation instructions](https://docs.speedscale.com/quick-start/)

### 1\. Record and Snapshot Traffic

1.  Speedscale continuously records approximately **7 days of traffic**
2.  Select a service (e.g., frontend service)
3.  Save a **snapshot** of recent traffic (e.g., last 15 minutes)
    *   Takes ~30 seconds
    *   Inbound traffic → saved as **tests**
    *   Outbound traffic → saved as **mocks**

> This snapshot becomes your searchable dataset.

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### 2\. Filter or Browse Requests

1.  Open the snapshot

![Example snapshot interface](https://speedscale.com/_astro/snapshot-example-1440.DKP6Jdpk_28i5Lo.webp)

2.  Optionally apply a basic filter (e.g., API path like `/api/payment/payment`)

![Example filter](https://speedscale.com/_astro/filter-example.B_Yr9xCu_1FnVQN.webp)

3.  Click any request to view the **entire recorded payload**
    *   Headers
    *   Body
    *   Encoded content (already decoded for you)

Unlike observability tools, this is **actual wire-level data**, not telemetry summaries.

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### 3\. Identify a Data Token

1.  Locate a piece of data of interest (example: an email address)

![Example email](https://speedscale.com/_astro/email-highlighted-1200.furYJYwo_ZPAoXa.webp)

2.  Copy it to your clipboard

> Speedscale automatically detects data patterns like:
> 
> *   Emails
> *   Names
> *   Coordinates
> *   Other PII (≈35 data types)
> 
> It can also redact or flag PII if configured. Check the Tokens tab for example discovered data.

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### 4\. Run a Full-Text Search

1.  Open the **Search** feature
2.  Paste the copied data token
3.  Run the search across the snapshot

Speedscale will:

*   Scan potentially **gigabytes of traffic**
*   Return results in seconds
*   Show _every location_ where the data appears

![Search Results](https://speedscale.com/_astro/search-results-1440.D63tAzlL_28VTsW.webp)

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### 5\. Understand the Search Results

Search results show:

*   Which request/response pairs contain the data
*   Exact locations using **JSON paths**, such as:
    *   HTTP headers
    *   Request body fields
    *   JWT claim names and values
    *   Encoded or binary payloads

You don’t need to:

*   Decode Base64
*   Parse JWTs
*   Understand protocol internals

Speedscale does that automatically.

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### 6\. Investigate the Incident

1.  Click a matching request/response pair
2.  Inspect what happened in context
    *   Errors
    *   Downstream failures
    *   User-specific issues

Instead of:

> “Which service logged this?”

You now ask:

> “Where does this **data** flow through my system?”

This works **across all services**, not just a single component.

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## Key Takeaways

*   No need for pre-planned tracing or logging
*   Full-text search across real production traffic
*   Works on encoded and binary protocols
*   Ideal for incident response and forensic debugging
*   Complements (does not replace) observability tools

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## Learn More

Visit **[https://speedscale.com](https://speedscale.com/)** to explore full-text traffic search and traffic replay.

## Table of Contents

## Capture and replay your production traffic

Speedscale records live traffic from your Kubernetes services and turns it into tests, mocks, and load tests automatically. 30-day free trial, full feature set.

[Start free trial](https://app.speedscale.com/signup) [Book a demo](https://speedscale.com/company/demo/)