MCP Vitals Blog
Practical guides on keeping MCP servers healthy — handshakes, tool-schema drift, monitoring, and trust.
MCP Security Basics: What Server Authors Should Watch
Practical MCP security guidance for 2026: tool poisoning, unauthenticated exposure, the new OAuth 2.1 requirements, and supply-chain risks server authors face.
Choosing an MCP Monitoring Tool: What to Look For
A checklist for picking an MCP monitoring tool in 2026 — protocol-aware checks, schema-drift detection, auth awareness, and alerting that doesn't add noise.
MCP Observability: Logs, Metrics, and Protocol-Level Checks
A practical guide to observing MCP servers in 2026: what to log, which metrics matter, and why protocol-level checks catch what uptime pings miss.
The MCP Server Ecosystem in 2026: Growth and Trends
How the Model Context Protocol server ecosystem grew through 2026, who governs it now, and what the July 2026 spec rewrite means for server operators.
A Checklist for Shipping a Reliable MCP Server
A practical checklist covering transport, tool schemas, error handling, versioning, and monitoring for a production-ready MCP server.
How to Test MCP Tool Schemas in CI
A practical approach to catching MCP tool-schema drift before it ships: snapshot tests, semantic diffing, and JSON Schema validation in CI.
Monitoring a stdio MCP Server When There's No Endpoint to Ping
There's no port to poll on a stdio MCP server. Here's how to actually verify the handshake, and what a process check misses.
Monitoring a Remote Streamable HTTP MCP Server: What Actually Needs Watching
How to properly monitor a remote MCP server over Streamable HTTP: the real handshake, required headers, session gotchas, and schema drift.
Common MCP Server Failures and How to Catch Them Early
A rundown of the failure modes that actually break MCP servers in production, from handshake errors to schema drift, and how to catch each one early.
Building Trust for Your MCP Server With a Public Status Page
How a public status page helps developers trust your MCP server, what it should track beyond basic uptime, and how to set one up without overbuilding.
How to Add a Health Badge to Your MCP Server README
A practical walkthrough for adding a live, always-current health badge to your MCP server's README, with markdown examples and what to check for.
MCP Server Uptime: Status Pages and Public Health Badges
Why MCP server uptime is different from web uptime, and how status pages and public health badges help you catch handshake and schema failures early.
Setting Up Alerts for MCP Server Downtime and Drift
Downtime and schema drift are different incidents with different urgency. Here's how to structure MCP server alerts so both get caught without the noise.
Detecting Breaking Changes in Your MCP Tool Schemas
MCP tool schemas can change with no warning from the protocol. Here's how to define, catch, and alert on breaking schema changes before clients do.
Why HTTP 200 Is Not Enough for MCP Health Checks
An MCP server can return 200 and still be broken. Here's why transport-level checks miss protocol failures — and what a real MCP health check verifies.
How to Monitor an MCP Server the Right Way
Uptime pings aren't enough for MCP servers. Learn what to actually check — handshake, tools/list, schema stability — and how to monitor it properly.
MCP Servers vs Traditional REST APIs: What Changes for Reliability
How MCP servers differ from REST APIs in discovery, versioning, statefulness, and error handling, and what that means for reliability practices.
What Is MCP Tool-Schema Drift (and Why It Silently Breaks Agents)
MCP tool-schema drift explained: how server-side changes to tools quietly break agents, why it's hard to detect, and how to catch it before users do.
Understanding the MCP Handshake: initialize and tools/list
How the MCP initialize handshake and tools/list discovery actually work, what commonly breaks, and how the 2026 spec revision changes things.
What Is the Model Context Protocol (MCP)? A Practical Overview
A clear, practical explainer of the Model Context Protocol (MCP): what it is, how it's structured, and why reliability matters for teams running MCP servers.