otel-mcp

An MCP server that emits OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs to one or more OTLP endpoints at the same time, in any of the three OTLP wire formats:

• grpc — OTLP/gRPC (protobuf over HTTP/2)

• http/protobuf — OTLP/HTTP binary protobuf

• http/json — OTLP/HTTP proto3-JSON (spec-compliant)

It also ships tool-mimicry profiles that produce realistic signal bundles shaped like well-known tools (nginx, postgres, redis, kafka, aws-lambda, kubernetes pod, generic gRPC service), so you can populate a collector or backend with traffic that looks like a real environment.

Install

uv venv
uv pip install -e .

Run

otel-mcp           # stdio transport — wire into any MCP client

Or via an MCP client config (e.g. Claude Desktop, Claude Code):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "otel": {
      "command": "otel-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Env bootstrap

If OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT is set on launch, an endpoint named default is registered using the standard OTEL env vars:

• OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT

• OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL (grpc | http/protobuf | http/json)

• OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS (comma-separated k=v pairs)

• OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_INSECURE (gRPC TLS toggle)

Tools

Endpoint management

Endpoints are selected per call: every signal-emitting tool accepts an endpoints: [names] arg. Omit it to fan out to every endpoint that accepts that signal type.

Raw signal emission

Mimicry

Built-in profiles:

Example session

> add_endpoint name="otel-collector" url="http://localhost:4318" protocol="http/protobuf"
> add_endpoint name="jaeger-json"    url="http://localhost:4318" protocol="http/json" signals=["traces"]
> mimic_tool profile="nginx" options={"count": 50, "error_rate": 0.1}
> mimic_tool profile="postgres"
> generate_load profile="kafka" iterations=10 interval_seconds=2
> send_trace service_name="checkout" spans=[
    {"name": "POST /checkout", "kind": "server", "duration_ms": 42, "attributes": {"http.response.status_code": 200}},
    {"name": "charge_card",    "kind": "client", "parent_name": "POST /checkout", "duration_ms": 18,
     "attributes": {"peer.service": "stripe"}}
  ]

Adding a new mimic profile

1. Write a function returning a MimicBundle in src/otel_mcp/mimics.py.

2. Register it in the PROFILES dict at the bottom of that file.

3. Call list_mimic_profiles to confirm it picked up the parameters.

Profiles stay declarative: each returns span/metric/log specs that flow through the same generator pipeline, so they inherit correct resource merging, wire format support, and fan-out automatically.