MCPHawk is a logging and monitoring tool for Model Context Protocol (MCP) traffic, giving deep visibility into MCP client-server interactions by understanding MCP’s JSON-RPC 2.0 messages. It passively captures and reconstructs MCP traffic across common transports like stdio and HTTP streaming, and provides a real-time web dashboard, search and filtering, and export for offline analysis.
Project status
- The source appears actively maintained, with a recent update on 2026-09-23 (v1.0.0), just a day before today.
- Update cadence looks bursty rather than steady, with the prior documented updates in mid-2025 (v0.4.x, v0.3.x) followed by a major v1.0.0 in 2026-09-23.
AI summary generated
Recent updates
v1.0.0
MCPHawk v1.0.0 is a major upgrade focused on a DevTools-style web UI and richer MCP visibility: recording agent activity across servers, inspecting full JSON-RPC calls, replaying tool calls, and surfacing problems and context cost. The release notes also claim broad MCP 2026-07-28 support plus export and metrics integrations, and expanded proxy/sniffing capabilities.
BreakingFeaturesv0.4.3
The provided release notes for v0.4.3 do not list any actual code or behavior changes, they only reference a compare link. The code diff for this release shows updates limited to CI/CD workflows and package metadata (pyproject.toml), not runtime/library source code.
v0.4.2
v0.4.2 updates the CLI wrapper command to fix an issue where the wrapper stripped parts of the MCP server command. The code change adjusts Typer argument parsing so the wrapper can more reliably pass through the full server command and its arguments.
v0.4.1
Release v0.4.1 is described as a packaging fix. The actual diff shows changes to packaging metadata and dependency declarations, including adding a new direct dependency and changing how Uvicorn is installed.
v0.4.0
v0.4.0 is primarily a UI refresh, described in the release notes as a large cleanup and improvements PR. The code diff shows a substantially reworked front-end layout with new filter/search components and a responsive filter sidebar, plus an updated static HTML entrypoint.
v0.3.3
v0.3.3 is primarily intended to improve MCP server name detection for stdio transport by adding a fallback when the initialize response is not available. The code diff also includes substantial frontend changes to the log table expanded view, adding richer message metadata display and client info parsing.
Featuresv0.3.2
v0.3.2 makes a small documentation update and removes several shell script files. The only visible change in the diff is README badge addition, plus deletion of multiple example and debug scripts.
v0.3.1
v0.3.1 is described as a refactoring test change, but the code diff shows a concrete refactor in the logging subsystem centered around SQLite connection handling. The largest functional change is in mcphawk/logger.py, where database access is routed through a new context manager and connection setup is standardized.
Featuresv0.3.0
Release v0.3.0 is documented as adding stdio support. The code diff shows additional, substantial frontend changes around how logs are filtered and displayed, including new transport and server filters and new log metadata columns (message ID, server, PID).
Featuresv0.2.0
Release v0.2.0 is described as adding an MCP server and expanding MCP transport support, but the release notes provide no concrete details beyond a reference to a large PR. The code diff provided shows multiple front-end behavioral and data-model changes that are not called out in the release notes.
Featuresv0.1.0
v0.1.0 is the initial release of mcphawk. It introduces a packet sniffer and a Vue-based frontend, bringing the core functionality and UI for the project for the first time.
Features