LastPing MCP server

Most monitoring watches a thing and tells you when it looks wrong. LastPing waits for a thing to check in and tells you when it doesn't. That inversion is the whole product: a job that breaks can't send you an error, but it can fail to send you anything — and absence is the one signal a broken process can still produce.

This repository holds the open-source pieces: the lastping CLI and the MCP server. The hosted service they talk to is at lastping.dev, free for individuals.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tp322d/lastping-app/main/install.sh | sh

No Go toolchain needed — that pulls a prebuilt binary for macOS and Linux, on amd64 and arm64, and verifies its checksum. Windows builds are on the releases page.

If you do have Go:

go install github.com/tp322d/lastping-app/cmd/lastping@latest

lastping run — reporting you can't forget

Put it in front of whatever you already run:

lastping run --monitor <monitor-id> -- python nightly_etl.py
lastping run --monitor <monitor-id> -- ./backup.sh
lastping run --monitor <monitor-id> -- claude

It sends a start ping, runs your command untouched, and reports the exit code when it finishes — success on 0, failure on anything else, with the tail of stderr attached so the alert says why.

Three properties worth knowing, because they are the difference between a monitoring wrapper you can trust in production and one you remove after a bad night:

command exited with, so CI behaves exactly as it did before you added it.

• Your exit code always propagates. The wrapper exits with whatever your

job still runs, still writes its output, still exits normally.

• A failed ping never touches your command. If LastPing is unreachable, your

descriptors, so wrapping a REPL or an agent session works.

• Interactive stays interactive. stdin and stdout are handed over as file

Why a wrapper rather than an instruction? Because anything advisory decays. An AI agent told to report on every task will stop doing it, and a cron line you meant to add a curl to never gets it. A wrapper reports from the process lifecycle, so nothing depends on anybody remembering.

Traces (ships with the next server release)

lastping run always configures your wrapped command's OpenTelemetry exporter, in its environment only, so an auto-instrumented agent can export its own trace spans with no code change:

(/v1/traces) when LASTPINGAPIKEY is not set, so a headerless exporter can still authenticate; the ping host's /v1/traces (the Bearer form) when it is set.

• OTELEXPORTEROTLPTRACESENDPOINT — the header-free monitor-URL form

appended to whatever you already set, so a trace's spans join the same run the surrounding pings report.

• OTELRESOURCEATTRIBUTES — lastping.monitorid=,lastping.runid=

LASTPINGAPIKEY is set and you have not already set that variable yourself.

• OTELEXPORTEROTLP_HEADERS — Authorization=Bearer , only when

Any of the three you already set is left alone. The key is never used to authenticate a ping; the ping URL stays unauthenticated by design, as above.

MCP server — let an agent set up its own monitoring

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.