04.18.2025: Tracing for MCP client server applications - Phoenix

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04.18.2025

Tracing For MCP Client Server Applications

We’re excited to announce a powerful capability in the OpenInference OSS library openinference-instrumentation-mcp — seamless OTEL context propagation for MCP clients and servers.

What’s New?

This release introduces automatic distributed tracing for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP). Using OpenTelemetry, you can now:

• Propagate context across MCP client-server boundaries
• Generate end-to-end traces of your AI system across services and languages
• Gain full visibility into how models access and use external context

The openinference-instrumentation-mcp package handles this for you by:

• Creating spans for MCP client operations
• Injecting trace context into MCP requests
• Extracting and continuing the trace context on the server
• Associating the context with OTEL spans on the server side

Set up

1. Instrument both MCP client and server with OpenTelemetry.
2. Add the openinference-instrumentation-mcp package.
3. Spans will propagate across services, appearing as a single connected trace in Phoenix.

phoenix/tutorials/mcp/tracing_between_mcp_client_and_server at main · Arize-ai/phoenix

Walkthrough Video

Tracing MCP Clients & Servers: How-To - YouTube

Tracing MCP Clients & Servers: How-To

Acknowledgments

Big thanks to Adrian Cole and Anuraag Agrawal for their contributions to this feature.