Get Started

Create an MCPulse account, add an MCP, mint an ingest key, wrap your server with the SDK, and see live tool analytics in minutes.

MCPulse tells you whether your MCP tools actually work for the models calling them. This quickstart takes you from a new account to real numbers on the overview.

1. Create your account

   Go to the MCPulse dashboard and sign up with your email address. There is no password — MCPulse emails you a magic link. Click it and you are signed in.

   The link lands on a page that spends a couple of seconds building your account, and says so. Clicking the link is the first moment anyone knows the address is real, so it is where the account, your membership, your billing record and a sample MCP are all created.

   If a colleague has already invited you, sign in with the address they invited. You join their account with the role they gave you, rather than getting an empty account of your own — and no sample data, because their account already has real servers in it. See Invite someone.

2. Look around the sample first

   A new account opens on Acme Orders: a sample MCP with thirty days of traffic, seven tools, three clients and every insight rule tripped at least once.

   It is there so the product can show what it does before you have wired anything up. It carries a Sample badge and a Remove button, and it is excluded from your plan’s usage. See The sample MCP.

3. Create an MCP

   Click New MCP and give it a name — the name of the server you are about to instrument. One MCP per server.

   Creating one opens it. That first overview is empty on purpose; it carries a prompt pointing at the install steps, and it disappears the moment a payload arrives. See Create an MCP.

4. Mint an ingest key

   On the Installation page, click Create key and name it — production, staging, whatever you will recognise in six months.

   The full key is shown once, in the panel that appears at creation. Copy it now.

   Only a SHA-256 hash and the first 12 characters are stored. MCPulse cannot show you the key again, and nobody here can recover it. If you lose it, revoke it and mint another.

5. Put the key in your environment

   MCPULSE_KEY=mp_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   

   Never commit it. See Authentication.

6. Install the package

   npm

   npm install @mcpulse/sdk
   

   @modelcontextprotocol/sdk is a peer dependency — whatever version your server already uses. MCPulse has no runtime dependencies of its own.

7. Wrap your server

   One import, one wrap, after every tool is registered. watch returns the same server, so nothing downstream changes.

   import { McpServer } from "@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/server/mcp.js";
   import { StdioServerTransport } from "@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/server/stdio.js";
   import { watch } from "@mcpulse/sdk";
   
   const server = new McpServer({ name: "my-server", version: "1.0.0" });
   
   // … your registerTool calls …
   
   watch(server, { key: process.env.MCPULSE_KEY });
   
   await server.connect(new StdioServerTransport());
   

   Serving over streamable HTTP instead? A fresh McpServer is built per request, so the wrap goes inside the factory. See Serving over HTTP.

8. Restart and make a call

   Restart your server and connect a client to it. The startup payload goes out on initialize, and each tools/call is buffered and flushed every 5 seconds or 30 calls, whichever comes first.

   The overview refreshes itself every 30 seconds and the live call feed every 5, so calls, outcomes, latency and response size appear on their own.

   If nothing shows up, the feed is the page to open: it lists individual calls rather than counts, which is the only thing that can answer “did the call I just made land”.

   Three metrics — retries, first-call success and tool pairs — are computed by the nightly pass at 02:00 UTC, so they are labelled as of yesterday and are empty on your first day. That is normal.

Nothing arriving?

Turn on debug and watch stderr:

watch(server, { key: process.env.MCPULSE_KEY, debug: true });

The SDK never throws and never blocks, which also means it never complains — a missing key makes watch() a silent no-op by design. SDK troubleshooting lists what each debug line means.

Next steps

Read the overview

What each card, chart and panel on the main screen is measuring.

First-call success

The headline metric, and how retries are detected.

Insights

The five rules, their thresholds, and what to do about each.

Invite your team

Anyone who can see the account can read its numbers.