🐞 Bug Summary

When starting the application with Gunicorn, initialization fails due to a pydantic_settings.exceptions.SettingsError triggered while parsing the environment variable observability_exclude_paths. The error originates from Pydantic’s environment settings source during the creation of the Settings instance in mcpgateway/config.py. This indicates that the value provided for observability_exclude_paths is not in the expected format or type (for example, a string instead of a list or JSON array). As a result, the configuration cannot be loaded and the application fails to start.

Pls note the above summary is generated by AI using the logs. I have provided logs in Logs section.

🧩 Affected Component

Select the area of the project impacted:

• [YES ] mcpgateway - API
• mcpgateway - UI (admin panel)
• mcpgateway.wrapper - stdio wrapper
• Federation or Transports
• CLI, Makefiles, or shell scripts
• Container setup (Docker/Podman/Compose)
• Other (explain below)

🔁 Steps to Reproduce

1. helm upgrade --install mcp-stack . --namespace mcpgw-rbac --create-namespace=false -f values.yaml --wait --timeout 5m --debug

2. PLUGINS_ENABLED: "true"

3. pgadmin:
   enabled: false

4. mcpFastTimeServer:
   enabled: false

5. probes:
   readiness:
   type: exec
   command:
   - sh
   - -c
   - pg_isready -U "$POSTGRES_USER"

6. liveness:
   type: exec
   command:
   - sh
   - -c
   - pg_isready -U "$POSTGRES_USER"

🤔 Expected Behavior

📓 Logs / Error Output

Paste any relevant stack traces or logs here.
⚠️ Do not paste secrets, credentials, or tokens.
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/app/.venv/lib64/python3.12/site-packages/gunicorn/app/base.py", line 110, in get_config_from_filename
spec.loader.exec_module(mod)
File "", line 999, in exec_module
File "", line 488, in _call_with_frames_removed
File "/app/gunicorn.config.py", line 19, in
from mcpgateway.config import settings
File "/app/mcpgateway/init.py", line 19, in
from mcpgateway import reverse_proxy, wrapper, translate
File "/app/mcpgateway/reverse_proxy.py", line 67, in
from mcpgateway.services.logging_service import LoggingService
File "/app/mcpgateway/services/init.py", line 15, in
from mcpgateway.services.gateway_service import GatewayError, GatewayService
File "/app/mcpgateway/services/gateway_service.py", line 73, in
from mcpgateway.config import settings
File "/app/mcpgateway/config.py", line 1564, in
settings = get_settings()
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/app/mcpgateway/config.py", line 1542, in get_settings
cfg = Settings()
^^^^^^^^^^
File "/app/mcpgateway/config.py", line 1457, in init
super().init(**kwargs)
File "/app/.venv/lib64/python3.12/site-packages/pydantic_settings/main.py", line 194, in init
**pydantic_self._settings_build_values(
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/app/.venv/lib64/python3.12/site-packages/pydantic_settings/main.py", line 436, in _settings_build_values
source_state = source()
^^^^^^^^
File "/app/.venv/lib64/python3.12/site-packages/pydantic_settings/sources/base.py", line 498, in call
raise SettingsError(
pydantic_settings.exceptions.SettingsError: error parsing value for field "observability_exclude_paths" from source "EnvSettingsSource"

🧠 Environment Info

You can retrieve most of this from the /version endpoint.

🧩 Additional Context (optional)

Add any configuration details, flags, or related issues.