NGINX Cookbook

Extra debug headers

While you may not have looked closely, many of the top websites add additional header information to assist with debugging. Facebook adds an x-fb-debug header, Twitter has an x-transaction header, and sites such as https://www.wired.com/ insert the x-served-by headers to help trace what proxies your request has passed through. This information doesn't have any impact on the end user; however, the information is invaluable when trying to diagnose hard-to-diagnose cases. While much of the low-level debug information can only be produced within your application code, at a higher level, you can easily incorporate a few helpful headers. Here's an example:

add_header X-Host $hostname; add_header X-Request-ID $request_id; add_header ...