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Debugging your MCP integration

As the list of available tools keeps growing, sooner or later something will not work and some debugging becomes necessary. In this post I look into ways to troubleshoot your MCP integration.

Let's dive in!

To understand what we need to debug you need to be aware of the architecture of an MCP integration. It follows a client-server architecture, where AI models can request data through a host with an MCP client (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Claude Desktop, …) from MCP servers, which then retrieve relevant information from local or remote sources.

This means that when a problem occurs that there (at least) 2 places to look at.

Debugging the MCP client

Let’s start by looking into the client. The way you need to debug the client is completely dependent on the host. I’ll focus on GitHub Copilot and Claude Desktop.

GitHub Copilot

When VSCode encounters an error while trying to interact with an MCP server, you get a red error indicator in the Chat window:

Click on the icon and choose Show Output from the dropdown menu.

This will open up the logs in the Output window.

 Remark: Another option is to run MCP: List Servers from the Command Palette, select the server, and then choose Show Output.

Claude Desktop

The ‘go to’ location in case of troubles with MCP support in Claude Desktop is the MCP log file. This file can be found by going to File –> Developer –> Open MCP Log file… in Claude Desktop:

This log file contains a lot of information:

  • Server connection events
  • Configuration issues
  • Runtime errors
  • Message exchanges

 

Debugging the MCP server

The way to troubleshoot and debug a specific MCP server will completely depend on the MCP server implementation. So there are no strict rules or guidelines I could share here.

But I do want to point out the MCP inspector tool. This tool allows you to test and debug your MCP server.

When using SSE

When using SSE, you can  install and run the tool  directly through npx:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector

This will start the tool on a specific local URL ( http://127.0.0.1:6274 in our example).

Browse to that location to open the Inspector.

Now we can connect to our MCP server by specifying the SSE transport and specifying the URL of our MCP server:

Click on Connect afterwards connect to the MCP server.

Now you can go to Tools and click on List Tools to get the list of available tools and even give a tool a try:

When using STDIO

When using STDIO, you can include the command to start the MCP server when installing and running the tool:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector <command> <arg1> <arg2>

The rest of the experience remains the same.

More information

Debugging - Model Context Protocol

Use MCP servers in VS Code (Preview)

Inspector - Model Context Protocol

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