connection test

What does a connection test measure?

Four things: whether the endpoint answered at all, which protocol revision it negotiated, what its tools/list returned, and how long one round trip took.

That last figure is one request and one response, never the whole exchange. A number covering the handshake, the tool list, and the parsing would not be comparable between servers that differ in how many messages they need.

What can a result actually tell you?

What was true when it ran, and nothing after that. A test is a point-in-time record: it says an address answered on a date with a given set of tools.

It cannot tell you the server is up now, that its tools still work, or that it is safe to use. We record what a server returned on the date we asked it. We do not audit anyone's code, data handling, or permissions, and a check that connects successfully says nothing about any of those.

What do real results look like?

Mixed, and the distribution is the useful part. Across 82 attempts against 53 endpoints between 20 July and 5 August 2026: 40 answered auth_required, 29 connected, 4 returned protocol errors, 3 served a web page instead of an endpoint, 2 were blocked by our own outbound guard, 2 were unreachable, and 2 did not resolve.

Only 13 of those 82 describe something genuinely broken. The largest single group is servers correctly refusing an anonymous caller.

Example

On 5 August 2026 a check against https://docs.mcp.cloudflare.com/mcp connected, negotiated revision 2025-11-25, listed 2 tools, and completed a round trip in 3,925 ms. The honest way to state that is in the past tense with the date attached. Written as "live" or "currently working" it would be a claim about right now that no test performed on 5 August can support.