# Building Observability for MCP Servers: FleetWatch + MCP Blackbox Suggested

> Source: <https://dev.to/diya730/building-observability-for-mcp-servers-fleetwatch-mcp-blackbox-suggested-5c96>
> Published: 2026-07-31 21:13:52+00:00

MCP servers are quickly becoming the standard way AI agents reach tools, but the ecosystem is still missing basic infrastructure plumbing: uptime monitoring, latency tracking, and forensic debugging. When an agent run fails, "the MCP server did something weird" is usually where the trail goes cold.

I wanted both tools to stay narrow and not overlap with things I'd already built (`mcp-schema-watch`

for schema drift, `skillcheck`

for SKILL.md linting, Swarm Trace Viewer for swarm-run analysis). So FleetWatch and MCP Blackbox split the job in half — one watches, one records.

FleetWatch pings your registered MCP servers on a schedule and tracks:

The moment a server goes down, degrades, or recovers, FleetWatch fires an alert. It's built with TypeScript, NestJS, and Next.js, communicates over WebSockets for live status updates, and ships with a full test suite plus a GitHub Actions CI workflow.

🔗 [https://github.com/DIYA73/fleetwatch](https://github.com/DIYA73/fleetwatch)

FleetWatch tells you *something* broke. MCP Blackbox tells you *why*.

It's a recording proxy that sits in front of your MCP traffic and captures full request/response payloads. The interesting design decision was around retention: instead of keeping everything (expensive) or nothing (useless when you actually need it), Blackbox permanently pins anything around a failure and prunes the rest. A flight recorder for your MCP servers — the data you need, right when you need it, without the storage bill of logging forever.

Same stack as FleetWatch — TypeScript, NestJS, Next.js, WebSockets — so the two integrate cleanly.

🔗 [https://github.com/DIYA73/mcp-blackbox](https://github.com/DIYA73/mcp-blackbox)

FleetWatch and MCP Blackbox are deliberately separate — you can run either one on its own. But paired together, the workflow is simple: FleetWatch catches the failure in real time, and Blackbox already has the trace waiting for you.

Both are open source and public on GitHub — issues, stars, and PRs are always welcome. If you're building on MCP and hitting the same "I have no idea what just happened" wall, I'd love to hear how you're solving it.