LastPing README

LastPing alerts you when your AI agents fail, stall, wait for your approval or never start, and watches the cron jobs and CI/CD pipelines around them. Free for individuals.

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 client pieces: the lastping CLI, which wraps any command and reports its start, exit code and traces, and the MCP server, which lets an AI agent set up and read its own monitoring. The hosted service they talk to is at lastping.dev, free for individuals.

Quick start

# 1. Install the CLI (macOS and Linux, amd64 and arm64)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lastping-dev/lastping-app/main/install.sh | sh

# 2. Wrap a job: a start ping, your command untouched, then its exit code
lastping run --monitor <monitor-id> -- ./backup.sh

# 3. Or give your AI assistant the hosted MCP server, and sign in
https://mcp.lastping.dev/mcp

Create the monitor, and get its id, at app.lastping.dev, or let your assistant do it over MCP. Connect steps for each client are at lastping.dev/mcp/.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lastping-dev/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/lastping-dev/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:

• Your exit code always propagates. The wrapper exits with whatever your command exited with, so CI behaves exactly as it did before you added it.
• A failed ping never touches your command. If LastPing is unreachable, your job still runs, still writes its output, still exits normally.
• Interactive stays interactive. stdin and stdout are handed over as file descriptors, so wrapping a REPL or an agent session works.

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

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:

• OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT — the header-free monitor-URL form (<ping url>/v1/traces) when LASTPING_API_KEY is not set, so a headerless exporter can still authenticate; the ping host's /v1/traces (the Bearer form) when it is set.
• OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES — lastping.monitor_id=<id>,lastping.run_id=<rid> appended to whatever you already set, so a trace's spans join the same run the surrounding pings report.
• OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS — Authorization=Bearer <your key>, only when LASTPING_API_KEY is set and you have not already set that variable yourself.

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

Claude Desktop extension

A one-click install for Claude Desktop on macOS and Windows that keeps your key in the system keychain. It needs no Node.js.

1. Download lastping.mcpb.
2. Double-click it; Claude Desktop opens its install dialog.
3. Paste a write-scope key from Settings, API keys at app.lastping.dev.

The extension runs this repository's stdio binary (below) on your computer. It is built by mcpb/build.sh when a version is tagged, and every release is signed; the release build fails rather than ship an unsigned bundle. The certificate is self-signed, so Claude Desktop shows the extension as unverified. The signature still proves the bundle came from this repository's release pipeline and was not altered after it was signed. A local build of mcpb/build.sh without the signing secrets is unsigned and says so. MCPB_CERT_CA_ISSUED is kept for a future certificate from a public CA.

Claude Desktop through the mcp-remote bridge

Claude Desktop's config file runs local programs only, so LastPing connects through the mcp-remote bridge. Add this to claude_desktop_config.json (macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/, Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lastping": {
      "command": "/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/npx",
      "args": [
        "-y", "mcp-remote",
        "https://mcp.lastping.dev/mcp",
        "--header", "Authorization:${LASTPING_AUTH}"
      ],
      "env": {
        "PATH": "/FOLDER/THAT/HOLDS/npx:/usr/bin:/bin",
        "LASTPING_AUTH": "Bearer lp_your_key"
      }
    }
  }
}

• Needs Node.js. Claude Desktop does not read your shell's PATH, so give it the full path: run which npx in a terminal and put the result in command (with nvm it looks like /Users/you/.nvm/versions/node/v22.11.0/bin/npx), and its folder at the front of PATH in env.
• Quit and reopen Claude Desktop; it reads the file only at start-up. Settings, Connectors then lists lastping.
• Without a key, add LastPing as a custom connector instead (Customize, Connectors, Add custom connector, then paste https://mcp.lastping.dev/mcp) and sign in to LastPing in the browser. The same connector covers claude.ai, the Claude mobile apps and Cowork.

Other clients

Claude Code connects directly, no bridge: claude mcp add --transport http --scope user lastping https://mcp.lastping.dev/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer <key>". Cursor, Windsurf, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI and other clients: lastping.dev/mcp/#connect.

The hosted server is the recommended path, and it always carries the current tool set. Most clients connect by adding the URL and signing in to LastPing, with nothing to install; Cursor and Windsurf use the URL and an API key. With a key, Claude Desktop connects through the extension or the mcp-remote bridge above.

A stdio binary is also here if you would rather run it yourself:

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

The one that matters most is get_ping_instructions: an agent calls create_monitor, then asks for its own ping commands, and wires them into its own work — in one conversation, without a human opening a dashboard.

Ping API

Every monitor gets a URL. There is nothing to install and no library to keep current; anything that can make an HTTP request can report.

Add ?rid=<id> to pair a run's start with its result, so LastPing can group a run's pings and time it.

# The classic one-liner, at the end of a cron job:
curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://ping.lastping.dev/<monitor-id>

Traces

POST https://ping.lastping.dev/v1/traces accepts an OTLP/HTTP export (application/x-protobuf or application/json, gzip accepted) with a Bearer key (an ingest key bound to the monitor, from create_ingest_key; a write or admin key also works), or POST <ping-url>/v1/traces for exporters that cannot set headers. Spans need the resource attribute lastping.monitor_id; with lastping.run_id they join that run, and without it each trace becomes a run of its own. A payload is capped at 1 MiB decompressed, 500 spans per request and 2,000 spans per run. lastping run sets all of this up for you — see Traces above.

Monitoring as code

resource "lastping_monitor" "nightly_etl" {
  name          = "nightly-etl"
  slug          = "nightly-etl"
  schedule_kind = "cron"
  cron_expr     = "0 3 * * *"
  tz            = "Europe/Berlin"
  grace_s       = 900
}

The provider is on the Terraform Registry as lastping-dev/lastping, with source at lastping-dev/terraform-provider-lastping.

Links

• lastping.dev — the hosted service, free for individuals
• AI agent monitoring — the agent-first guide
• MCP server — connect configs per client
• Terraform provider — monitoring as code
• Integration guides — cron, Kubernetes, systemd, GitHub Actions, Python, Node

License

MIT. See LICENSE.