Netdata — Claude Code MCP server: metrics, logs, alerts
Hands your AI agent live monitoring data: metrics, logs, alerts and anomaly detection. Useful when you need to know what a server is doing without opening the dashboard.
claude mcp add --transport http mcp https://app.netdata.cloud/api/v1/mcpWhat Netdata does
Every Netdata Agent and Parent from v2.6.0+ is itself an MCP server, listening on the same port as the dashboard, 19999 by default. Through it an agent sees node hardware and OS details, searches metrics across contexts, instances, dimensions and labels, and reads active alerts plus their transition history. Metric queries take aggregations and groupings, and scoring traces root cause through correlations and anomaly detection.
There are three transports: WebSocket at ws://YOUR_IP:19999/mcp, HTTP Streamable at http://YOUR_IP:19999/mcp, and SSE at http://YOUR_IP:19999/sse. HTTP and SSE arrived in v2.7.2, so clients that speak them connect directly. Clients limited to stdio need a bridge: nd-mcp for WebSocket, or mcp-remote for HTTP and SSE. With mcp-remote over plain HTTP the --allow-http flag is required, and that traffic is unencrypted — worth remembering on a network you don't control.
Some data stays locked. Sensitive functions such as systemd-journal, windows-events and processes open with a temporary MCP API key generated on each Netdata instance and passed in the Authorization: Bearer header. Visibility depends on where you connect: a Parent covers its child nodes, a standalone node covers only itself. Running functions and reading logs from other nodes requires a Netdata Parent.
What it helps with
- see what a server was doing when it went down
- find the node eating memory
- walk an alert's transition history
- pull metrics by context and label without building charts
- read a node's system journal from the chat window
Example prompts for the agent
- List active alerts across all nodes and tell me which have been firing longest
- Find CPU anomalies over the last hour and name the likely cause
- Read
systemd-journalon web-01 and pull the errors from last night
How to install Netdata
Platform CLI: remote server
claude mcp add --transport http mcp https://app.netdata.cloud/api/v1/mcpPlatform CLI: remote server
codex mcp add mcp --url https://app.netdata.cloud/api/v1/mcpConfig file
{
"mcpServers": {
"mcp": {
"url": "https://app.netdata.cloud/api/v1/mcp"
}
}
}Config file
{
"servers": {
"mcp": {
"type": "http",
"url": "https://app.netdata.cloud/api/v1/mcp"
}
}
}Platform CLI: remote server
gemini mcp add -t http mcp https://app.netdata.cloud/api/v1/mcpStep by step, with commands for each platform: How to add an MCP server to Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, Gemini CLI and more
Questions about Netdata
How do I install Netdata MCP in Claude Code?
One command: claude mcp add --transport http mcp https://app.netdata.cloud/api/v1/mcp.
What does the Netdata MCP server do?
It exposes monitoring data: node and metric discovery, queries with aggregations, alerts and their history, and root cause scoring via anomaly detection. With a Netdata Parent you also get function execution and log access on connected nodes.
Do I need the nd-mcp bridge?
Only if your client supports stdio alone. Clients that handle HTTP or SSE connect to Netdata directly.
