mcpsnoop

Wireshark for MCP. mcpsnoop sits between your AI client and your MCP server and records every JSON-RPC frame they exchange, with no change to either side. Watch it live in your terminal, fail CI on what it finds, or send it to your tracing backend as OpenTelemetry spans.

The problem

The official MCP Inspector connects as its own client, so it never sees what your client (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex) actually sends your server. And anything that waits for a request to arrive can't show the call the model never made, or made with the wrong arguments. When a tool silently isn't called, capabilities don't line up, or a call just hangs, you're left digging through logs and guessing.

mcpsnoop sits in the real data path instead. Wrap your server command with it and watch every JSON-RPC frame live, as your real client and server talk.

In CI

This page is also the listing for the mcpsnoop GitHub Action, so here is the whole of it. It checks a captured session, files every finding as a code scanning alert, and fails the job on what you gated on.

permissions:
  security-events: write
  contents: read

steps:
  - uses: kerlenton/[email protected]
    with:
      session: artifacts/session.jsonl

Pin whichever release you want. The newest is on the releases page. Every input and output is in The GitHub Action further down, and every signal the check can fail on is in docs/CI.md.

OpenTelemetry

MCP revision 2026-07-28 deprecates protocol-level Logging and tells implementations to move to stderr on stdio, or to OpenTelemetry for structured observability. mcpsnoop covers both without touching the client or the server. A stdio server's stderr lines show up in the stream beside its frames, and every request becomes a span that follows the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions for MCP.

mcpsnoop export -T otlp -o trace.json   # spans from a capture
mcpsnoop --otlp-endpoint http://localhost:4318/v1/traces -- node build/index.js   # spans as calls complete

A tool call arrives as a span named tools/call search, carrying mcp.method.name, gen_ai.tool.name and error.type, so it lands in a dashboard built for MCP rather than one built for mcpsnoop. Live tool metrics for Prometheus are one flag away. Both are in docs/OPENTELEMETRY.md.

Quick start

See it right away, with nothing to set up.

mcpsnoop demo

To use it for real, wrap your server in your client's MCP config.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "my-server": {
      "command": "mcpsnoop",
      "args": ["--", "node", "build/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Everything after -- is the command that normally launches your server. Swap in whatever you already use, like python server.py, npx -y @scope/server, or a compiled binary.

On Claude Desktop you don't have to make that edit by hand.

mcpsnoop wrap my-server     # route my-server through mcpsnoop
mcpsnoop unwrap my-server   # put it back

wrap finds claude_desktop_config.json, copies it to claude_desktop_config.json.mcpsnoop.bak the first time, and rewrites only that one server's entry, so your formatting and every other server are left alone. Inside the rewritten entry the keys come back in alphabetical order. unwrap restores the file, and removes the backup once no server is wrapped any more. Restart Claude Desktop after either, since MCP servers are launched once at startup.

Then use your client as usual and open the UI.

mcpsnoop

No flags, no socket paths, no startup order to remember. The shim and the UI find each other on their own, and the UI backfills past sessions from disk.

For a streamable-HTTP server, run mcpsnoop as a reverse proxy.

mcpsnoop http --target http://localhost:3000/mcp --listen :7000

The HTTP status of every response shows in the stream, so a response that carries no JSON-RPC message of its own is still a visible frame rather than nothing. That covers the 401 challenge, the 403 on a rejected Origin, the 202 that acknowledges a notification, and the 502 when the target cannot be reached at all. A 401's WWW-Authenticate header is kept verbatim and shown in the inspector, since it names the auth scheme and the resource metadata to go to next. Filter by status with status:401 in the TUI, or by any failure with status:err. A 4xx or 5xx counts as an error, so a default mcpsnoop check run fails on it, and the call it answered reads as failed rather than as one still waiting.

No server of your own? Try it for real against a published test server, driven by your own client. To inspect a session after it happened, see review past sessions from logs.

Install

npm

No Go toolchain needed. Most MCP servers are written in Node or Python, so this is the shortest way in.

npx mcpsnoop -- node build/index.js

The npm package ships no code of its own. Six platform packages each carry one build, and npm installs the single one that matches your machine, so there is nothing to download at install time and nothing to unblock in a proxy. To keep it around rather than fetching it each run, npm i -g mcpsnoop.

Homebrew

brew install mcpsnoop

Go

go install github.com/kerlenton/mcpsnoop/cmd/mcpsnoop@latest

Prebuilt binaries for every platform are on the Releases page.

mcpsnoop ships completions for bash, zsh, fish, and PowerShell. Run mcpsnoop completion <shell> --help for the setup steps, which cover enabling completion and the install path for your OS.

Commands

Command	What it does
mcpsnoop -- <server>	wrap a stdio server as a transparent shim
mcpsnoop	open the live TUI
mcpsnoop --metrics-listen <addr>	run a headless hub and expose live Prometheus metrics
mcpsnoop http --target <url>	proxy a streamable-HTTP server
mcpsnoop export	render a session to json, html, text, har, or otlp
mcpsnoop check	fail CI on errors, invalid frames, warnings, routing mismatches, hung calls, late results, calls that may have run twice, tool drift, annotations that loosened or say nothing, or a latency budget
mcpsnoop baseline	inspect, accept, or reset trusted tool definitions
mcpsnoop diff	compare tools and calls across two captured sessions
mcpsnoop open	open a saved session in the TUI
mcpsnoop mock <session>	serve a captured session back as a stdio MCP server
mcpsnoop inventory	list every server that has run through mcpsnoop on this machine
mcpsnoop stats	fold every stored capture into one row per server and tool
mcpsnoop clients	show what each MCP client actually did on the wire, by name and version
mcpsnoop prune	delete saved session logs older than a cutoff
mcpsnoop wrap <server>	route one of Claude Desktop's servers through mcpsnoop
mcpsnoop unwrap <server>	put that server's entry back the way it was
mcpsnoop remote <user@host>	print the SSH tunnel command
mcpsnoop demo	play a scripted session

Run mcpsnoop help for the full list, or mcpsnoop help <command> for the flags of one.

How it compares

Each of these answers a different question, and where a tool sits decides which questions it can answer.

Tool	Where it sits	What it is for
MCP Inspector	its own client, connected to your server	trying a server by hand, in a browser or from a scriptable CLI
Snyk Agent Scan	its own client, launching or connecting to the servers in your configs to read their tools	scanning agents, MCP servers and skills on your machine for prompt injection and vulnerabilities
mcprec	on the wire, between client and server	recording a session once and replaying it as a test fixture without the network
mcpsnoop	on the wire, between client and server	watching what your real client and server say, failing CI on it, and exporting it as OpenTelemetry

A tool that is its own client sees the calls it makes, not the ones your client makes, so it cannot show the call your model never made or made with the wrong arguments. A scanner reads a definition before you trust it. mcpsnoop watches what happens once you have, including whether the definition changes later.

How it works

mcpsnoop is two roles in one binary. mcpsnoop -- <server> is the transparent shim your client spawns, forwarding bytes verbatim while shipping a copy of every frame to the hub. mcpsnoop with no arguments is that hub and its live TUI. They pair through a well-known socket and on-disk logs, so neither has to start first.

Because it sits in the actual pipe, not off to the side like the Inspector, it sees exactly what your real client and server say to each other, whatever the server is written in. What bounds its memory and its disk is in docs/HOW_IT_WORKS.md.

The GitHub Action

Everything below is what the action does for you. It installs mcpsnoop, checks the capture, files the findings in the Security tab, and fails the job on what you gated on.

permissions:
  security-events: write
  contents: read

steps:
  - uses: kerlenton/[email protected]
    with:
      session: artifacts/session.jsonl

Pin a release, whichever one you want. The newest is on the releases page. There is no floating v1, deliberately. The pinned release is also the binary the action installs, so the two can never disagree and there is no version default to go stale.

Input
session	the .jsonl capture to check, relative to the repository root. Required
fail-on	as --fail-on, defaulting to what the CLI defaults to
args	any other check flags, quoted as on a command line. --format is refused, since the action reads the report
upload-sarif	send the report to code scanning. true
category	the code scanning namespace. mcpsnoop. Vary it per leg of a matrix, or the legs overwrite each other
fail-on-findings	fail the job on a finding. true. Set false to file the alerts and let code scanning's required check decide
version	which mcpsnoop to install. Defaults to the release you pinned
install	false when mcpsnoop is already on PATH, which is the way in on a platform no release is built for

Outputs are outcome, sarif and exit-code. outcome is passed, findings, or error, and the third is worth handling separately. It means nothing was checked, which is not the same as nothing being found. A run that could not check fails the job whatever fail-on-findings says, because a pipeline that goes green having verified nothing is worse than one that fails.

The job needs security-events: write, or the upload answers 403. Set upload-sarif: false in a repository without code scanning. Running the same check without the action, the signals it can fail on and the exit codes are in docs/CI.md.

Documentation

Page	What is in it
Checking sessions in CI	every signal check can fail on, exit codes, assertions, JUnit and SARIF reports, comparing two sessions, and wiring it up without the action
OpenTelemetry and Prometheus	the spans and what they carry, streaming them to a collector, and live tool metrics
Using mcpsnoop	keys, filtering, export formats, replay, what a server asked your user for, cost in context, stats across captures, what each client actually sends, the server inventory, remote machines and the config file
Redaction	scrubbing secrets, during capture or from a capture you already have
How it works	memory bounds, the history limit, and pruning old logs
Try it for real	a published test server, driven by your own client
Review past sessions	where session logs live and how to open one after the fact

Security

mcpsnoop runs the server command you wrap, so only wrap servers you trust, and run untrusted ones in a container. It never executes anything you didn't put in your client config.

For remote workflows, use SSH tunnelling or SSH file transfer so transport auth, encryption, host verification, key rotation, and audit policy stay in your existing SSH setup.

What a capture can do to your terminal

A capture is data the other side chose. Frames and stderr lines can carry terminal escape sequences, and a terminal acts on whatever it is handed, which runs from a scrambled display through OSC 52 writing your system clipboard. mcpsnoop keeps only the colour sequences it generates itself and drops every other escape before a frame reaches your terminal. Table cells quote control characters so you can see they were there, the inspector spells them out in full, and the clipboard copy carries the escaped form, so nothing is hidden from you and nothing runs.

What a capture holds

Captured frames can include prompts, tool arguments, credentials, and tool results. docs/REDACTION.md covers scrubbing them, while you capture or afterwards. To report a vulnerability, see SECURITY.md.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the details.

License

MIT