How to Monitor WebSocket Connections with AI Coding Assistants
Gasoline MCP is a browser extension and local server that captures real-time browser telemetry and exposes it to AI coding assistants via the Model Context Protocol. It is the only MCP browser tool that monitors WebSocket connections — capturing opens, closes, and individual messages so your AI assistant can reason about real-time traffic.
The Problem with Debugging WebSockets
Section titled “The Problem with Debugging WebSockets”WebSocket debugging is painful. Messages fly by in DevTools at a rate that makes manual inspection impractical. There is no search. There is no way to correlate a dropped connection with the UI bug it caused. And critically, your AI assistant cannot see any of it.
If you are building a chat application, trading platform, or collaborative editor, WebSocket issues are some of the hardest to debug. A missing message, a silent reconnection, a stale price feed — these problems live in the stream of events flowing over the wire. You cannot just copy-paste a WebSocket stream into your AI assistant. The data is ephemeral, and by the time you notice the bug, the evidence is gone.
What Gasoline Captures
Section titled “What Gasoline Captures”Gasoline intercepts WebSocket activity at the browser level and buffers it for retrieval via MCP tool calls. Here is what your AI assistant gets access to:
- Connection lifecycle events — open and close, including close codes and reasons
- Sent and received messages — with precise timestamps for ordering analysis
- Connection metadata — URLs, protocols, and connection state
- Message payloads — full text content and binary frame sizes
All of this data is buffered locally on your machine and made available through a single MCP tool call. Your AI assistant can query the full WebSocket history for any tab at any time.
Use Cases
Section titled “Use Cases”WebSocket monitoring becomes valuable anywhere real-time data flows through your application:
- Chat applications — Diagnose message ordering bugs, detect dropped connections, and verify reconnection logic
- Trading platforms — Identify price feed gaps, detect stale data, and audit message delivery timing
- Collaborative editors — Debug OT/CRDT sync issues by inspecting the exact operation sequence exchanged between clients
- Real-time dashboards — Detect data staleness and verify that subscriptions remain active after network interruptions
- Multiplayer games — Analyze state synchronization problems by reviewing the full message exchange between client and server
No Other MCP Tool Does This
Section titled “No Other MCP Tool Does This”The major MCP browser tools — Chrome DevTools MCP, BrowserTools MCP, and Cursor MCP Extension — do not capture WebSocket events. They focus on console logs, network requests, and in some cases screenshots or browser automation. None of them intercept WebSocket frames.
If your application uses WebSockets, Gasoline is the only MCP tool that gives your AI assistant visibility into that traffic.
Example Workflow
Section titled “Example Workflow”You are debugging a chat application. Users report that messages stop appearing after a few minutes. The UI shows no errors. The console is clean.
You ask your AI assistant: “What’s happening with the WebSocket connection?”
The assistant calls Gasoline’s MCP tool and retrieves the WebSocket event log. It sees that the connection closed 30 seconds ago with code 1006 (abnormal closure) — no close frame was sent, which typically indicates a network interruption or server-side timeout. The assistant identifies that your server’s idle timeout is set to 60 seconds and your client has no heartbeat mechanism, then suggests adding a ping/pong keepalive interval.
Without Gasoline, this diagnosis would require manually watching the DevTools Network tab, catching the close event in real time, and interpreting the close code yourself.
How do I debug WebSocket issues with AI?
Section titled “How do I debug WebSocket issues with AI?”Install Gasoline and connect it to your AI coding assistant (Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf). Open your application in Chrome and reproduce the issue. Then ask your assistant about the WebSocket connection. Gasoline makes the full connection history available through MCP, so your assistant can inspect opens, closes, message sequences, and timing without any manual data gathering on your part.
Which MCP tools support WebSocket monitoring?
Section titled “Which MCP tools support WebSocket monitoring?”As of early 2025, Gasoline is the only MCP browser tool that captures WebSocket events. Chrome DevTools MCP, BrowserTools MCP, and Cursor MCP Extension provide console and network request capture but do not intercept WebSocket frames or connection lifecycle events.
Get Started
Section titled “Get Started”npx gasoline-mcp@latestOne command. No accounts. No configuration. WebSocket monitoring is enabled by default.