hono-telescope

hono-telescope

A debugging tool for Hono applications, inspired by Laravel Telescope: a dashboard that shows you every request with the logs, queries, exceptions and outgoing calls that happened inside it.

The same endpoint is also an MCP server. Point Claude Code, Cursor or any MCP client at it and your coding agent reads the running application's telemetry directly — the actual exception, the request that produced it, and the queries that ran — instead of being handed a pasted stack trace. Nothing else in the Hono ecosystem does that.

Zero runtime dependencies. Works on Node.js and Bun.

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🌐 Live Demo

A hosted instance of the example app, running 1.0. No installation needed.

📊 Open the dashboard — API base: https://hono-telescope.ilkerbalcilar.com

Hit a few endpoints and watch the entries appear:

BASE=https://hono-telescope.ilkerbalcilar.com

curl $BASE/api/users                # incoming request + Bun SQLite queries
curl -X POST $BASE/api/import-users # outgoing fetch to JSONPlaceholder, plus inserts
curl -X POST $BASE/api/webhook      # outgoing POST whose payload is recorded, `token` redacted
curl -X POST $BASE/api/db-error     # UNIQUE violation, recorded as a failed query; 409, no exception
curl $BASE/api/mixed-clients-test   # the fetch call is captured, the axios call is not
curl $BASE/api/slow                 # 2s handler, to see the duration column
curl $BASE/api/error                # exception recorded as a child of its request

The demo runs with memoryStorage({ maxEntries: 500 }) and no dashboard auth, so entries are public, capped at 500 and gone on restart. Don't send anything you wouldn't publish.

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✨ Features

Currently Available:

• 📡 MCP Server - The dashboard endpoint doubles as a Model Context Protocol server, so an AI agent can read live requests, exceptions and queries with five read-only tools
• 🔍 HTTP Request Monitoring - Track incoming requests with headers, payloads and response bodies, and outgoing fetch calls with headers, payloads and responses
• 🚨 Exception Tracking - Capture and monitor application errors with stack traces
• 📝 Log Monitoring - Monitor console logs with different severity levels
• 🗄️ Database Query Monitoring - Explicit per-client instrumentation for Prisma, Sequelize, MongoDB, and Bun SQLite with execution time
• 📊 Beautiful Dashboard - Modern React-based web interface with real-time updates
• 🎯 Zero Configuration - Works out of the box with sensible defaults
• 🏷️ Tagging System - Organize entries with custom tags and context
• 🔧 TypeScript Support - Full type definitions and type safety
• ⚡ High Performance - Minimal overhead with efficient memory management
• 🌐 Bun & Node.js - Works with both runtimes seamlessly
• 🗂️ Multiple Database Support - Integrates with popular database libraries
• ⚙️ Zero Runtime Dependencies - Depends only on Hono (peer dependency)

Planned Features (Roadmap):

• 💾 Data Export - Export monitored data in multiple formats (JSON, CSV)
• 🔔 Alerts & Notifications - Real-time alerts for errors and performance issues
• 📈 Analytics & Reporting - Advanced analytics and historical data analysis
• 🔐 Authentication & Authorization - Dashboard access control beyond basic auth
• 🌍 Multi-Tenancy Support - Support for multiple isolated projects
• 🧩 Plugin System - Extensible plugin architecture for custom integrations
• 🔄 Data Persistence - Optional database storage for long-term monitoring

📦 Installation

# Using npm
npm install hono-telescope

# Using yarn
yarn add hono-telescope

# Using pnpm
pnpm add hono-telescope

# Using bun
bun add hono-telescope

Quick Start

import { Hono } from 'hono';
import { createTelescope, memoryStorage } from 'hono-telescope';

const app = new Hono();
const telescope = createTelescope({ storage: memoryStorage({ maxEntries: 1000 }) });

app.use('*', telescope.middleware());
app.route('/telescope', telescope.dashboard());

export default app;

Visit /telescope. Telescope is on by default outside production and off inside it.

📋 Complete Example: See src/example/index.ts for a full working example with all Telescope features including database query monitoring, external request tracking, and error handling.

MCP Server

Telescope's dashboard doubles as an MCP server, so an AI coding agent can read the running application's telemetry instead of being handed pasted stack traces. There is nothing extra to mount — it is served from the dashboard you already mounted:

app.route('/telescope', telescope.dashboard()); // MCP is at /telescope/mcp

claude mcp add --transport http telescope http://localhost:3000/telescope/mcp

Tool	What it answers
recent_exceptions	What just failed — each exception with its request and that request's logs and queries
recent_requests	Which requests ran; filter by minStatus, status, minDuration, uriContains
request_detail	One request in full, untruncated, with every child entry
slow_queries	The slowest recent queries and which request each ran in
stats	How many entries of each type exist

All five are read-only; there is no tool that clears or writes telemetry. minStatus: 400 is the one worth remembering — a handler that returns an error status without throwing records no exception, so that filter is the only way to find those failures.

The transport is the current Streamable HTTP revision (2026-07-28), with 2025-11-25 still accepted for older clients. GET and DELETE answer 405: this revision has no SSE stream and no sessions.

Clients that only speak stdio

Many editors cannot point an MCP client at a URL. The package ships a bridge for them: it reads one JSON-RPC message per line on stdin, forwards it to the endpoint your app already serves, and writes the reply back on stdout.

claude mcp add telescope -- npx -y hono-telescope mcp-stdio \
  --url http://localhost:3000/telescope/mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "telescope": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "hono-telescope", "mcp-stdio"],
      "env": { "TELESCOPE_URL": "http://localhost:3000/telescope/mcp" }
    }
  }
}

--url (or TELESCOPE_URL) is the only required option. For a dashboard behind dashboard.auth, pass credentials as a header — --header is repeatable, and TELESCOPE_HEADER takes one for clients that can only set environment variables:

npx -y hono-telescope mcp-stdio --url https://example.com/telescope/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Basic $(printf 'user:pass' | base64)"

The bridge forwards; it does not implement the protocol a second time. Your app stays the only place that answers MCP, so the bridge adds no tools, no session state and no new dependency — and it needs the app to already be running.

The MCP endpoint exposes exactly what the dashboard exposes — request and response bodies, headers and SQL — to whatever agent you connect. It is covered by dashboard.auth and by the same production refusal: with enabled: true under NODE_ENV=production, mounting without credentials throws.

Configuration

import { createTelescope, memoryStorage, alsContext, consoleCollector } from 'hono-telescope';

const telescope = createTelescope({
  enabled: process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'production',
  storage: memoryStorage({ maxEntries: 1000 }),
  context: alsContext(),
  collectors: [consoleCollector()],
  dashboardPath: '/telescope',
  ignorePaths: ['/health'],
  ignoreStaticAssets: true,
  capture: {
    requestBody: true,
    responseBody: true,
    maxBodySize: 65536,
  },
  redact: {
    headers: ['authorization', 'cookie', 'set-cookie', 'x-api-key', 'proxy-authorization'],
    bodyKeys: ['password', 'token', 'secret', 'apikey', 'authorization'],
  },
  dashboard: {
    auth: { username: 'admin', password: 'telescope' },
  },
});

All options are optional — createTelescope() works with the defaults.

Key	Type	Default	Notes
enabled	boolean	NODE_ENV !== 'production'	Disable in production by default
storage	StorageAdapter	memoryStorage({ maxEntries: 1000 })	In-memory storage with 1000 entry limit
context	ContextStrategy	alsContext()	AsyncLocalStorage-based request context tracking
collectors	Collector[]	[consoleCollector(), exceptionCollector(), fetchCollector()]	Default collectors for console, exceptions, and fetch; pass [] to disable all
dashboardPath	string	'/telescope'	Dashboard mount path; must match the path in app.route()
ignorePaths	string[]	['.well-known']	Paths to exclude from monitoring
ignoreStaticAssets	boolean	true	Skip monitoring requests for static files (.js, .css, .svg, etc.)
capture.requestBody	boolean	true	Capture incoming request bodies
capture.responseBody	boolean	true	Capture outgoing response bodies
capture.maxBodySize	number	65536	Maximum bytes to capture per body (64 KB)
redact.headers	string[]	['authorization', 'cookie', 'set-cookie', 'x-api-key', 'proxy-authorization']	Header names to redact
redact.bodyKeys	string[]	['password', 'token', 'secret', 'apikey', 'authorization']	Object keys to redact in request/response bodies
dashboard.auth	DashboardAuth | false	undefined	Optional basic auth for dashboard; required if enabled: true in production

Mounting at a Custom Path

If you mount the dashboard at a path other than /telescope, you must set dashboardPath to the same value:

const telescope = createTelescope({ dashboardPath: '/admin/debug' });
app.route('/admin/debug', telescope.dashboard());

The middleware uses dashboardPath to avoid recording the dashboard's own traffic, and the dashboard uses it to construct its base URL.

Database Queries

Pass your database client to Telescope for query instrumentation. Prisma returns a new client—use the returned one:

import { createTelescope } from 'hono-telescope';
import { PrismaClient } from '@prisma/client';

const telescope = createTelescope();
const prisma = telescope.instrumentPrisma(new PrismaClient());
// Use the returned `prisma` client, not the original

Supported databases:

const prisma = telescope.instrumentPrisma(new PrismaClient());
telescope.instrumentSequelize(sequelize);
const mongoClient = new MongoClient(url, { monitorCommands: true });
telescope.instrumentMongo(mongoClient);
telescope.instrumentBunSqlite(db);

Note: Automatic database interception was removed in 1.0 because it never worked under Node ESM and captured only raw SQL where it did run. Explicit per-client instrumentation is now required.

A query that fails is recorded too, marked failed with the client's own error message, so a failed command is distinguishable from a slow one in the dashboard and over MCP. This covers Prisma, MongoDB and Bun SQLite. Sequelize is the exception: it is instrumented through the afterQuery hook, which does not appear to run when a query fails, so failed Sequelize queries are currently not recorded at all. Fixing that needs verification against a real Sequelize.

Call each instrument* method once per client. Unlike the collectors, they are not idempotent (only instrumentBunSqlite guards against double wrapping), so instrumenting the same client twice records every query twice.

instrumentBunSqlite wraps the query and prepare statement factories, so statement calls (all, get, run, values) are recorded. Queries issued directly on the database — db.exec, db.run, db.all, db.get — are not captured.

Security

The dashboard exposes request and response bodies, headers, and SQL. Telescope is therefore disabled when NODE_ENV === 'production'. If you enable it there anyway, you must supply dashboard.auth; mounting without it throws.

You have two options for production:

1. Supply credentials to protect the dashboard with basic auth:

createTelescope({
  enabled: true,
  dashboard: { auth: { username: 'admin', password: 'secret' } },
});

2. Explicitly opt out of auth to acknowledge full exposure (no auth, dashboard fully open):

createTelescope({
  enabled: true,
  dashboard: { auth: false },
});

Sensitive headers (authorization, cookie, set-cookie, x-api-key, proxy-authorization) and body keys (password, token, secret, apikey, authorization) are redacted by default, at any nesting depth. Redaction is recursive through nested objects and arrays, case-insensitive, and replaces values with [REDACTED] rather than deleting them.

Limitations

• Outgoing request bodies are captured only when they are already in memory — a string, a URLSearchParams or an ArrayBuffer. A ReadableStream, FormData or Blob body, and the body of a Request object passed as the first argument to fetch, are skipped and the payload stays empty. Reading those would either consume the body the caller is about to send or force a clone() that can stall on Node.
• Streamed responses are not captured. Responses produced by Hono's streamText and streamSSE are recorded without a body, so that recording never buffers or delays a stream. Detection relies on the Transfer-Encoding: chunked header those helpers set (the bare stream() helper sets no content-type, so it is skipped too); a hand-rolled new Response(readableStream, { headers: { 'content-type': 'text/plain' } }) sets neither header, so it is read and buffered before being recorded. Set Transfer-Encoding: chunked or a non-text content type on such a response to opt it out of capture.
• Request and response bodies larger than capture.maxBodySize are recorded as metadata only ({ truncated: true, size }), and a non-JSON text/* request body is recorded as { body: text }. A JSON array body is wrapped so that a recorded body is always an object: { body: [...] } for requests, { response: [...] } for responses. Redaction still reaches inside the array.

Custom Storage Adapters

Implement StorageAdapter and verify it against the contract suite that ships with the package:

import { runStorageContract } from 'hono-telescope/testing';
import { myStorage } from './my-storage';

runStorageContract('myStorage', () => myStorage());

The suite (a Vitest suite; run it with your own test runner installed) pins the two ordering guarantees the dashboard relies on: list returns newest first, and findByParent returns oldest first.

Upgrading from 0.x

The 1.0 release introduces a new API centered on createTelescope():

0.x (Old API)

import { setupTelescope } from 'hono-telescope';

setupTelescope(app, {
  enabled: true,
  max_entries: 1000,
  sanitize_headers: ['authorization'],
});

1.0 (New API)

import { createTelescope, memoryStorage } from 'hono-telescope';

const telescope = createTelescope({
  storage: memoryStorage({ maxEntries: 1000 }),
  redact: { headers: ['authorization'] },
});
app.use('*', telescope.middleware());
app.route('/telescope', telescope.dashboard());

Key changes:

• setupTelescope(app, config) is replaced by createTelescope(config) with explicit middleware and dashboard mounting
• Configuration keys are now camelCase (e.g., max_entries → maxEntries, sanitize_headers → redact.headers)
• Database interception is now explicit per-client; automatic interception was removed
• Axios interception was removed (axios on Node does not use fetch)
• A request whose handler throws is recorded with the status your own onError returned, and the exception is recorded as a child entry of that request

Development

Getting Started

First, install dependencies:

bun install

Then build the project for the first time:

bun run build

Running in Development Mode

Start the TypeScript watcher and example app:

Terminal 1 - TypeScript Compilation (Watch Mode)

bun run dev

This watches for TypeScript changes and compiles them to JavaScript.

Terminal 2 - Example Application

bun run dev:example

This starts the example Hono application with hot reload at http://localhost:3000

• Example API endpoints: http://localhost:3000/api/...
• Dashboard: http://localhost:3000/telescope

Test all endpoints at once with the test script:

bash src/example/test-all-endpoints.sh

This will automatically test all endpoints and populate the dashboard with data.

License

MIT