World's Fair 2025
The State of MCP observability: Observable.tools — Alex Volkov and Benjamin Eckel, W&B and Dylibso
Overview
The increasing prevalence of Machine Communication Protocol (MCP) agents is creating an observability blind spot for developers. As agents utilize more tools via MCP, understanding their end-to-end execution becomes challenging. This talk introduces observable.tools as a manifesto to drive a community conversation around standardized, vendor-neutral MCP observability, advocating for the adoption of OpenTelemetry (otel) to address this growing issue.
Who should watch
- AI Engineers building or deploying MCP agents.
- Product Managers overseeing AI agent development.
- Developers experiencing difficulties in debugging and monitoring MCP agent behavior.
- Platform providers looking to integrate observability into their MCP tooling.
Key takeaways
- The rise of MCP agents introduces significant observability challenges, making it difficult to track agent behavior and troubleshoot issues.
- Weights & Biases (W&B) has introduced bespoke MCP observability support within its Weave platform, allowing developers to trace MCP tool calls by setting an environment variable.
- OpenTelemetry (otel) is presented as a vendor-neutral, standardized solution for distributed tracing, comprising primitives like traces and spans.
- MCP agents can be integrated with OpenTelemetry by propagating trace context through MCP's meta payload, enabling end-to-end visibility.
- A demo showcased a TypeScript agent successfully sending traces to W&B Weave via otel, demonstrating cross-language compatibility.
- The observable.tools initiative aims to foster community collaboration on standardized MCP observability solutions.
- MCP Run plans to export telemetry to otel-compatible sinks, supporting both server profiles and client tasks.
- Community involvement is crucial for developing higher-level SDKs, establishing semantic conventions for agents, and adding otel support to MCP platforms.
Notable quotes
*The rise of MCP is creating an observability blind spot.*
*If you're going to ship MCP to these production environments, you must seamlessly integrate with these observability platforms.*
*MCP agents are really just another distributed system and we've been doing that for decades. So open telemetry is just the way that's that we've like settled on doing that.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.