Health check endpoint

When you use the SSE (-t sse) or streamable HTTP (-t streamable-http) transport, the MCP server exposes a health check at /healthz. Load balancers, monitoring, and orchestration can use it to verify that the server is running and accepting connections.

What you’ll achieve

You can probe readiness from scripts or upstream checks when the server uses an HTTP transport.

Before you begin

The server running with -t sse or -t streamable-http (not stdio).

Send a health check request

Endpoint: GET /healthz

Response:

Status code: 200 OK
Body: ok

Examples:

# For streamable HTTP or SSE transport with default listen address (localhost:8000)
curl http://localhost:8000/healthz

# Health check on a separate listen address (for example Kubernetes probes
# while --address is bound to 127.0.0.1 behind a sidecar)
./mcp-grafana -t streamable-http --address 127.0.0.1:8000 --healthz-address :8080
curl http://localhost:8080/healthz

The /healthz handler only reports that the HTTP server is up; it does not check Grafana connectivity. A --healthz-address listener is not wrapped by --allowed-hosts / --allowed-origins validation, matching --metrics-address.

Note: The health check endpoint is only available when using SSE or streamable HTTP transports. It is not available with the stdio transport (-t stdio), because stdio does not start an HTTP server.