A packet capture is a log of network traffic at an interface, and useful for diagnosing a wide variety of issues in distributed (internet/intranet) systems. If you you need to know who sent what, to who and when a packet capture will tell. How Packet Captures Help In most cases your web/API handler gets a runtime object representing each request, and for debugging those can be logged (e.g. written to CloudWatch) so no need to actually see the network packets that made up the request, right? Maybe. Maybe even mostly. But for some classes of issues, "request object" may not be trustworthy. Some bugs, some performance issue, some odd behaviors defy explanation when looking only at the request in processed form. Perhaps you have a situation where your application code adds a header to a response but the client doesn't seem to respect it: Is the client buggy? Did some layer of server code overwrite or ignore it? Did the client receive the response packets at all?…