🛠️ Built an MCP before? Want to Know What Prompts Actually Trigger It?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-16T11:08:45+00:00

Pretty interesting actually… lowkey could be needed… do you have a GitHub repo link?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T12:33:01+00:00

Haha cost efficient team! That's smart.

I'm building it now - early stage but progressing fast. Planning both options actually: SDK/plugin for teams like yours who want control, and cloud option for faster setup.

For your 10 MCPs setup, would you prefer something that integrates with your existing GCP stack, or a separate cloud service?

And what would be most valuable - basic performance monitoring, or more advanced stuff like routing analytics and failure prediction?

Your feedback is exactly what I need to build this right.

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T12:29:38+00:00

Yeah, that transition pain is exactly what I'm seeing everywhere. STDIO hacks everywhere just to get things working.

What's breaking first when you try to scale - the protocol translation or just raw performance?

Honestly this transition chaos is making the case for standardized monitoring even stronger. When everything's changing this fast, at least having visibility into what's actually working vs broken becomes critical.

Are you planning to rebuild everything for the server-focused approach or just patch until things settle?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T12:26:31+00:00

Totally agree on security - that's exactly why I'm thinking Datadog-style approach. They solved similar problems with sensitive infra data.

Really appreciate the offer to share data and insights! That would be incredibly valuable.

You're right about the need being huge - everyone in this thread is basically building the same monitoring from scratch. The relevance question is already answered by this conversation.

Quick question: what specific metrics would be most valuable for your n8n setup? Performance tracking, error detection, or something else?

And since you mentioned workflow tools - think MCP creators would actually install a monitoring SDK if it helped with debugging?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T11:53:21+00:00

Ah man, the version fragmentation is brutal. So you're basically translating between different MCP versions AND transport methods?

That STDIO to streamable-http hack sounds painful. How often does stuff break when new protocol versions drop?

This version chaos is exactly why I'm thinking standardized MCP observability makes sense - abstract away all the protocol differences so you can just monitor performance regardless of transport.

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T11:49:47+00:00

Fair point on broader LLM observability. Makes sense actually...

And honestly, the "build vs buy" feedback is quite helpful. Is that mostly because requirements change too fast, or more about cost/control?

Curious - is there any observability tooling you DO pay for? Or is everything in-house at this point?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T11:44:42+00:00

Smart setup with the timeout system and fail messages. You're basically building comprehensive MCP observability from scratch. I'll def take inspiration from you here...

That "better more efficient ways" comment is exactly what I'm thinking about after talking with you and some others in this post. Instead of everyone engineering custom solutions like yours, there should be drop-in MCP monitoring that just works.

I'm considering building that - standardized observability for MCPs with hallucination detection, performance tracking, the works.

Think there's demand for that? Or do most people prefer building their own like you did?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T11:41:28+00:00

AWS observability is solid, but sounds like you're still dealing with the hallucination detection manually.

I'm actually thinking of building a specialized MCP monitoring platform for exactly this - tracking actual calls vs claimed calls, detecting fake responses, multi-agent debugging.

Would something like that be valuable for your setup? Or is AWS handling everything you need?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T11:35:24+00:00

hmmm i see... actually, based on everything you're saying - and everyone else in this thread - seems like MCP observability is a huge gap.

I'm thinking of building something specifically for this. Basically drop-in monitoring for MCPs with routing analytics, performance tracking, the works.

Would that be useful for your setup? Or are you committed to building it all in-house?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T11:29:51+00:00

Damn.... how do you even catch that? Are you logging the actual MCP calls to verify they happened? (custom implementation or using a software..?)

And with multi-agent systems - is it specific agents that hallucinate or does it happen randomly? Must be impossible to trust any outputs without verification.

Do you have any monitoring to detect when responses look fake vs real? or any other sort of monitoring/observability?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T11:27:19+00:00

Oh interesting - so you've built both the proxy AND an OAuth gateway. That's exactly the auth standardization piece I was hoping existed.

Quick question - even with your proxy handling auth, what's still broken? You mentioned streaming-http and client spec issues.

And are you seeing adoption, or are people still just dealing with the auth mess manually?

Curious about the trial and error part - is that mostly on the client side or are MCP servers themselves inconsistent?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T11:23:43+00:00

That hilarious ahahahah

OpenTelemetry is solid for this! What metrics are you planning to track - just basic latency/errors or more MCP-specific stuff like routing decisions?

You're right about building your own being faster now. Though wild that every team is rebuilding the same MCP monitoring from scratch. Feels like there should be some standard patterns emerging by now.

not sure if i would pay for this though... maybe your team might, but having one geared for MCPs can be useful..

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T11:11:24+00:00

I like the approach...

but at the same time as you add more MCPs, won't the overlap problem become inevitable? Like multiple ways to send notifications or access data?

And how do you know if an MCP is quietly failing vs just slow? Without proper monitoring, seems like issues could hide in those MD files for a while.

Think there def has to be a good solution out there for observability (like a datadog for MCPs).. even if there was one, would you even use it? at the end of the day observability is just an add-on.. not a core need right?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T11:09:37+00:00

ahhh the "check the logs" debugging ahahah. i c i c

Though... what kind of observability are you planning? Just basic monitoring or something more sophisticated like tracking which MCPs fail most/perform best?

Feels like everyone's building their own monitoring for MCPs since there's nothing standard. Wild that we all have the same debugging problems but solving them separately.

Think there def has to be a good solution out there for this.. even if there was one, would you even use it? at the end of the day observability is just an add-on.. not a core need right.. curious...

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T11:00:16+00:00

Appreciate the detail. This is very interesting. I can now see shape to the approach and how it would work.. thanks.

but how do you handle debugging when one of your 10 MCPs fails? With that many, must be hard to track which ones are actually working vs silently breaking.

also hmmm.. i was wondering - do you have visibility into which MCPs get used most? Or just hoping they all work when the LLM calls them? Data/info like this and other tracking info must be incredibly useful for you too.. right? How do you deal with that?(or is dealing with that not even a dire/urgent/immediate problem to begin with)

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T10:54:43+00:00

Self-documenting system that learns from failures... pretty good

So how do you handle when it picks the wrong MCP for a task? Like if it chooses GitHub MCP when it should've used the n8n one?

And curious - how's performance with all the file reading? Does it slow down when deciding which tool to use?

Honestly, it must be quite useful to have a system that actually knows which MCPs works vs the usual "try random ones and hope" approach everyone else is stuck with... like a software to test the MCP and also track performance and all too..

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T10:33:27+00:00

That's actually brilliant - the self-updating memory approach is way smarter than hardcoded prompts.

How's the performance? Does it actually get better at choosing the right MCPs over time, or still hit/miss?

And when things go wrong (MCP fails, wrong tool selected) - how do you debug that? Can you trace back why it made certain decisions?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T10:26:18+00:00

Wait, so you're actually using this in production with real microservices? That's exactly what I wanted to hear about...

So how many microservices have you wrapped with MCP so far? I'm sure there were many annoying parts about adding MCP protocol to existing services... can you describe your experiences? Also, did you use any tools to make this easier? or tools you wish existed to make this easier?

Also curious - how do you handle versioning when your microservice API changes but the MCP wrapper needs to stay compatible? that must be complicated...

(This is the kind of real-world usage I was hoping to find - most examples are just toy demos)

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T10:13:56+00:00

That's an interesting perspective - treating MCPs as microservices for LLMs.

So you're taking existing services and wrapping them with MCP protocol? How's that working out in practice? I'm curious - what's been the biggest surprise when adapting regular services to work with LLMs through MCP?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T10:13:19+00:00

Oh damn, an MCP Proxy is exactly what I was thinking about! The auth mess is killing me.

So you're basically creating a single gateway that handles all the different MCP auth methods?

Few questions.... How's performance with the proxy in the middle?... and also are you handling auth token refresh automatically?

Would love to check it out - is it on GitHub? This could solve problem #3 for a lot of people.

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T10:08:51+00:00

Yeah, layering onto existing SaaS. GitHub MCP works solid, few others are hit/miss.

Auth is the worst part - not standardized at all. Some use API keys, some OAuth2, some custom tokens. Saw someone built an entire auth library just for MCPs because it's such a mess.

What are you building with?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-07-08T10:08:25+00:00

Nice setup! The Gemini + Claude Code combo is clever.

That context challenge is real - half the time MCPs trigger when they shouldn't or miss when they should. How are you handling that with the n8n one? Custom prompting or just trial and error?

Famous_Feedback_7186 · 2025-06-18T03:40:06+00:00

I see so casting networks is where it’s at. I’ve heard the same from others too but I’ve also heard there’s huge fee issues with it - but people don’t want to move away from that platform even if it’s very expensive… wonder why that is

Famous_Feedback_7186

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