Blog · AliveMCP
Reports, deep-dives, and reliability notes
We run the public MCP uptime dashboard, so we see the failure modes early. This is where we write them up — quarterly registry reports, reliability patterns, and practical guides for anyone operating Model Context Protocol servers.
Latest
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Deep dive · 2026-04-25
Multi-region MCP probe deployment — the walkthrough for catching edge-cache-localised outages
The second of the practical-routine series. A single-region probe is a useful lie — it catches DNS, TLS, and hard 5xx, and confidently misses the regional failure modes (CDN edge-cache divergence, ASN routing weirdness, region-local origin outages). The deployment walkthrough for running probes from three or more geographic regions, three deployment patterns (laptop, three-cloud, edge), the five regions worth probing from, the two-of-N aggregation rule, time-skew gotchas, the shared-state design, the credentialed-probe + multi-region intersection, and a copy-pasteable shell wrapper around the credentialed probe.
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Deep dive · 2026-04-25
Running a credentialed MCP health check, end to end
The practical follow-up to the auth primer. The eight-step probe sequence for an authenticated MCP server, the scoped probe-credential design that makes it safe, the canonical-JSON tool-list hash that catches drift on authenticated lists too, the token-expiry watchdog that pages 72 hours before the probe goes blind, and a copy-pasteable shell recipe — about 120 lines of bash + curl + jq — you can run from a CI box this afternoon.
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Deep dive · 2026-04-25
MCP authentication primer — what the auth-walled 16.8% bucket says about publishing private MCPs
366 of the 2,181 endpoints in the Q2 audit said hello and refused to talk —
initializesucceeded, every tool call returned 401 or JSON-RPC-32001. The four authentication patterns in the wild, the four reasons the bucket is large, the OAuth 2.1 spec story in MCP, and a four-posture decision tree for publishing a private MCP server without ending up in the bucket. -
Deep dive · 2026-04-25
Schema drift in MCP tool definitions — the silent breakage no HTTP probe can catch
Servers don't only fail by going down — they also fail by quietly changing shape. A tool removed in a refactor, a parameter renamed, a description rewritten, while every HTTP probe keeps returning a green dot. We measured a 7.1% drift rate over 48 hours across 196 healthy public MCP servers. The four shapes drift takes, what each one breaks for downstream agents, and the canonical-JSON hash that catches every one.
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Deep dive · 2026-04-25
JSON-RPC health checks vs HTTP probes — what an MCP server health check actually checks
An HTTP probe verifies a TCP socket. An MCP server health check has to verify the JSON-RPC envelope, the protocol version, the tool list shape, and the tool list hash across probes. Walks through what each layer catches, why HTTP-only monitors miss 53% of real failures, and the canonical 50-line probe sequence we run every 60 seconds.
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Deep dive · 2026-04-24
Why MCP servers die silently — 7 failure modes from 2,181 endpoints
The taxonomy behind the Q2 audit's headline number. Each of the seven recurring ways MCP servers fail in production, with concrete examples from the dataset, what catches each one, what doesn't, and the order to wire detection in. Schema drift gets the most underestimated honourable mention.
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Report · 2026-04-24
State of the MCP Registry — Q2 2026: 91% of public endpoints are dead
We probed every remote MCP endpoint listed across six public registries. Only 9% answered correctly on a real
initializehandshake. Full methodology, per-registry breakdown, seven recurring failure modes, and a reproducible probe script.
Coming soon
We publish on a weekly cadence. Next up: a status-page surface-area walkthrough — what to publish from the per-region probe states publicly, what to keep internal, and how the per-region state map should render for users who don't know what an ASN is. After that, the Q3 2026 registry audit (mid-July) will re-run every probe from all five regions in parallel and report bucket-by-bucket movement vs Q2 — including the new regionally degraded bucket the multi-region rollout is built to surface, plus whether the credentialed-probe rollout shrinks the auth-walled 16.8% bucket as expected.
Join the waitlist and we'll email when new posts are up — no more than one mail per week.