Otel
About
W3C Trace Context bridge for the Model Context Protocol — propagate traces through MCP _meta (SEP-414) and emit OpenTelemetry spans so Host → MCP server → tool → downstream shows up as one trace.
Details
- Author
- studiomeyer-io
- Downloads
- 236
Jump to
- reads traceparent / tracestate / baggage from the caller's _meta
- starts a SERVER span named tools/call <toolName> as a child of the caller's span
- runs your handler with that span active (via the OTel context)
- ends the span with OK / ERROR status and records thrown exceptions
- host.chat-turn [INTERNAL]
Setting up with Highlight
This MCP is not yet compatible with Highlight’s one-click setup. However, you can still use it with Highlight by following these steps:
- Download and install Highlight from highlightai.com/download
- Navigate to the plugins tab and select "Add Custom Plugin"
-
Configure the plugin with the settings below
Plugin Name
OtelCommand (node, npx, python, etc.)Please refer to the README for specific instructions on how to obtain API keys or other required environment variables.
- Enable "Start Automatically" if you want the plugin to start when Highlight launches
From the repository
Follow the repository README to install the server and add its MCP configuration to your client.
Claude Desktop / Cursor
Paste into your MCP client config file to install this server.
{
"mcpServers": {
"otel": {
"mcp-otel": {
"command": "docker",
"args": [
"run",
"-d",
"--name",
"jaeger",
"\\"
]
}
}
}
}McpServers
{
"mcp-otel": {
"command": "docker",
"args": [
"run",
"-d",
"--name",
"jaeger",
"\\"
]
}
}mcp-otel
W3C Trace Context bridge for the Model Context Protocol. It propagates trace context through MCP's _meta field and emits OpenTelemetry spans, so a request flowing Host → MCP server → tool → downstream HTTP shows up as one connected trace in Jaeger, Tempo, Honeycomb, or Datadog.
---
Why this exists
The MCP release candidate of 2026-07-28 nailed down distributed tracing for MCP:
- SEP-414 reserves the unprefixed _meta keys traceparent, tracestate, and baggage for W3C Trace Context and W3C Baggage. These keys ride along in params._meta of every request, and MCP transports must pass them through untouched.
- SEP-2577 deprecated MCP's logging capability and pointed at OpenTelemetry as the observability path going forward.
Spec post: <https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2026-07-28-release-candidate/>
So the protocol now says where the trace context lives and which telemetry system to use — but there was no small library that does the actual plumbing: read the caller's context out of _meta, start a correctly-parented OpenTelemetry span for the tool call, and let your downstream calls hang off it. That's all mcp-otel is.
It is deliberately thin. It does not configure OpenTelemetry for you, ship an exporter, or hide your tracer. You keep full control of sampling, resources, and exporters; mcp-otel only bridges _meta ↔ spans.
Install
```bash
npm install mcp-otel @opentelemetry/api
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