Can someone please help to find the protocol used by the Azure Storage Explorer to connect to Azure storage?? is it SMB or REST?
Azure Storage Explorer (ASE) is a wrapper around azcopy command tool.
Here is a sample of azcopy command I pasted into the notepad
and Azcopy internally uses REST api.
In order to capture all the REST api calls going out you can also use fiddler tool.
Follow the instruction from the link below and you should be able to see them. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-query/web-connection-fiddler
So the order is ASE uses -> azcopy uses -> REST API.
or you can also find the azcopy logs at this location for individual session at "%USERPROFILE%.azcopy"