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Operate (Lifecycle & Management)

Operate MCP servers with consistent lifecycle management, observability, and governance. This page combines operations and management into one high‑level guide.

Operational Excellence

  • Observability: standardized logs, metrics, and tracing; correlate via request IDs and gateway.
  • Automation: automate rollouts, scaling, and remediation; codify runbooks.
  • Reliability: design for failure; use circuit breakers and graceful degradation.
  • Performance: set SLOs; monitor and optimize continuously.
  • Security: defense in depth at runtime (policies, approvals, least privilege).

Operational Readiness (Pre‑Prod)

  • Dashboards and alerting in place; on‑call rotation and incident response defined.
  • Logging, tracing, and metrics standardized (OpenTelemetry); correlation IDs across components.
  • Backups and recovery tested for any externalized state.
  • Capacity planning done; load/burst and dependency failure modes tested.

Monitoring & Observability

  • Four signals: latency, traffic, errors, saturation; plus policy denials and approval deferrals.
  • Key metrics: tool success rate, p95 latency, error classes, cost/quotas, dependency health.
  • Health/readiness endpoints; dependency checks with timeouts and fallbacks.

Lifecycle Management

  • Curated catalog: only deploy approved servers; require SBOMs, provenance, signatures, and scans.
  • Approval workflow: registration, promotion, ownership, SLOs recorded; audit trails by default.
  • Multi‑tenancy: per‑tenant isolation for configs, logs, metrics, and limits; tenant‑aware authZ.
  • Remote/external servers: govern through a gateway/proxy where possible; document constraints and SLAs.

Tooling & Automation

  • One operator/controller framework for all servers; avoid bespoke operators per team.
  • Use Helm or operator frameworks but standardize org‑wide; version your ops configs.
  • Runbooks: dependency outages, rate‑limit responses, rollback steps, and escalation mapped.

SLOs and Incident Response

  • Example baselines to tune: tool success rate ≥ 99.0% monthly; p95 ≤ 400 ms.
  • Taxonomy: availability, latency, correctness (contract failures), security, quota/budget.
  • Flow: detect → triage (blast radius) → mitigate (degrade/circuit break) → RCA → fix/rollback → catalog learnings.