MCP Readiness Scanner

Production readiness scanner for MCP servers and agentic AI tools

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Note: For security scanning, see Cisco's MCP Scanner. This tool focuses on operational readiness — whether your MCP tools will behave reliably in production.

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What It Does

MCP Readiness Scanner analyzes MCP tool definitions and configurations for operational issues like:

• Missing timeout guards — Will operations hang indefinitely?
• Unsafe retry loops — Could retries cause resource exhaustion?
• Silent failure paths — Are errors properly surfaced?
• Overloaded tool scope — Is the tool trying to do too much?
• Missing error schemas — Can agents handle failures programmatically?

Quick Start

# Install
pip install mcp-readiness-scanner

# Scan a tool definition
mcp-readiness scan-tool --tool my_tool.json

# Scan an MCP config
mcp-readiness scan-config --config-file ~/.config/mcp/config.json

# List available providers
mcp-readiness list-providers

No API keys required. Works out of the box with zero external dependencies.

Example Output

$ mcp-readiness scan-tool --tool examples/sample_tool_definitions/bad_tool.json --format markdown

# MCP Readiness Scan Report

## Summary
**Target:** `examples/sample_tool_definitions/bad_tool.json`
**Readiness Score:** **25/100** (Critical)
**Production Ready:** No ❌

### Findings Overview
| Severity | Count |
|----------|-------|
| 🔴 Critical | 0 |
| 🟠 High | 1 |
| 🟡 Medium | 4 |
| 🔵 Low | 2 |
| ⚪ Info | 0 |

## Findings

### 🟠 High (1)
#### 1. No timeout configuration
- **Category:** Missing Timeout Guard
- **Location:** `tool.do_everything`

Tool 'do_everything' does not specify a timeout. Operations may hang indefinitely...

Features

Inspection Providers

Provider	Status	Dependencies	Description
Heuristic	✅ Always Available	None	Static analysis for common issues
YARA	Optional	yara-python	Pattern matching on metadata
OPA	Optional	opa binary	Policy-based checks with Rego
LLM Judge	Disabled by default	LiteLLM + model	Semantic analysis

Output Formats

• JSON — For CI pipelines and programmatic consumption
• Markdown — For PR comments and human review
• SARIF — For GitHub Code Scanning integration

Operational Risk Categories

Category	Description
silent_failure_path	Tool may fail without surfacing errors
non_deterministic_response	Response format varies unpredictably
missing_timeout_guard	Operations may hang indefinitely
no_observability_hooks	Lacks logging, metrics, or tracing
unsafe_retry_loop	Retry logic may cause resource exhaustion
overloaded_tool_scope	Too many capabilities in one tool
no_fallback_contract	No graceful degradation defined
missing_error_schema	Error responses lack structure

Installation

# Basic installation
pip install mcp-readiness-scanner

# With YARA support
pip install mcp-readiness-scanner[yara]

# With all optional dependencies
pip install mcp-readiness-scanner[all]

Optional Dependencies

# For YARA pattern matching
pip install yara-python

# For OPA policy checks
brew install opa  # macOS
# or download from https://www.openpolicyagent.org/

# For LLM semantic analysis
pip install litellm
export MCP_READINESS_LLM_MODEL=ollama/llama2  # or gpt-4, claude-3-sonnet, etc.

CI/CD Integration

GitHub Actions

name: MCP Readiness Check
on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  scan:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          python-version: '3.11'
      - run: pip install mcp-readiness-scanner
      - run: mcp-readiness scan-tool --tool tool.json --format sarif -o results.sarif
      - uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v3
        with:
          sarif_file: results.sarif

Exit Codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success (no critical/high findings)
1	High severity findings found
2	Critical findings found

Configuration

Create .mcp-readiness.toml in your project:

[scan]
fail_on_critical = true
fail_on_high = false
min_score = 70

[heuristic]
max_capabilities = 10

[yara]
enabled = true

[llm]
enabled = false  # Disabled by default
model = "ollama/llama2"

Or use environment variables:

export MCP_READINESS_SCAN_FAIL_ON_CRITICAL=true
export MCP_READINESS_SCAN_MIN_SCORE=70

Programmatic Usage

import asyncio
from mcpreadiness import ScanOrchestrator
from mcpreadiness.providers import HeuristicProvider

async def main():
    orchestrator = ScanOrchestrator()
    orchestrator.register_provider(HeuristicProvider())

    result = await orchestrator.scan_tool({
        "name": "my_tool",
        "description": "Does something useful",
        "timeout": 30000,
    })

    print(f"Score: {result.readiness_score}/100")
    print(f"Ready: {result.is_production_ready}")

asyncio.run(main())

Documentation

• Architecture — System design and components
• Taxonomy — Operational risk categories explained
• Providers — How to use and create providers
• Usage — Detailed CLI and configuration guide

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please see our contributing guidelines.

# Development setup
git clone https://github.com/mcp-readiness/scanner
cd scanner
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Run tests
pytest

# Run linting
ruff check mcpreadiness tests

License

Apache-2.0 — See LICENSE for details.

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MCP Readiness Scanner — Because production reliability matters.