The State of MCP observability: Observable.tools — Alex Volkov and Benjamin Eckel, W&B and Dylibso
Jun 20, 2025 · 16:56
Alex Volkov (Weights & Biases) and Benjamin Eckel (Dylibso) argue that MCP-based AI agents create observability blind spots, and that OpenTelemetry-based distributed tracing, combined with community initiatives like observable.tools, can provide end-to-end visibility. They show how Weave's MCP support and mcp.run's upcoming OTel export enable tracing across client and server, using context propagation via MCP's metadata to stitch traces together. Volkov shares a meta story where Claude Opus 4 used MCP to automatically fix its own observability code, discovering and querying a support bot without human intervention. The episode calls for tool builders to adopt OTel and join semantic conventions efforts for agent observability.
