Runbook: MCP Hangar not responding

Alerts: MCPHangarNotResponding (critical) · MCPHangarAllProvidersDown (critical)

What it means

Prometheus cannot scrape the Hangar (up{job="mcp-hangar"} == 0) for 1m, or every registered MCP server is down while at least one is configured. The gateway is effectively unavailable to clients.

Impact

All tool calls fail. This is a user-facing outage.

Diagnose

kubectl -n <ns> get pods -l app.kubernetes.io/name=mcp-hangar
kubectl -n <ns> describe pod <pod>          # crashloop / OOMKilled / probe failures
kubectl -n <ns> logs <pod> --tail=200
kubectl -n <ns> get endpoints <svc>         # is the Service backed by a ready pod?
up{job="mcp-hangar"}
sum(mcp_hangar_mcp_server_up)               # 0 while mcp_hangar_mcp_server_info > 0 ?

Check readiness: GET /health/ready reflects event-store durability posture — a not-ready pod is pulled from the Service.

Remediate

  • Crashloop → fix the failing dependency shown in logs; roll back the last deploy if it correlates.
  • OOMKilled → raise memory limits (see MCPHangarHighMemoryUsage).
  • All-providers-down → the servers are the problem, not Hangar; work provider-unhealthy.
  • Scrape-only failure (app healthy) → check the ServiceMonitor/NetworkPolicy allowMonitoring.

Escalate

If not resolved in 15m or the root cause is infrastructural (node, network, registry), page the platform on-call.