Grafana MCP (grafana/mcp-grafana) is Grafana Labs’ official Model Context Protocol server. It
gives any MCP-aware agent (Claude, an ADK agent, an IDE assistant) tool access to a live Grafana
instance — the same category of thing as What is MCP Toolbox, but for observability data instead of
databases.
What it exposes
| Capability | Concretely |
|---|---|
| Metrics & logs | Query Prometheus/Mimir and Loki through Grafana’s datasource layer |
| Dashboards | Search, read, and manage dashboards |
| Alert rules | Create, read, and manage alerting |
| Incident & Sift | Work with Grafana Incident and Sift investigations directly |
| Deeplinks | Generate links back into Grafana for a human to open the same view |
Agent (Claude / ADK / IDE)
│
▼
mcp-grafana server ──▶ Grafana instance
├── Mimir (metrics)
├── Loki (logs)
├── Tempo (traces, via a dedicated tracing MCP server)
├── Alerting
└── Incident / Sift
Two deployment shapes
Self-hosted (open source) — run it yourself via uvx mcp-grafana, pointed at your instance:
GRAFANA_URL=https://your-stack.grafana.net \
GRAFANA_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN=glsa_xxxxxxxx \
uvx mcp-grafana
Hosted (public preview, 2026) — Grafana now runs a remote MCP server at mcp.grafana.com/mcp,
authenticated with OAuth 2.1 over Streamable HTTP, exposing 50+ tools: everything in the open-source
server plus Grafana Assistant capabilities. No self-hosting required, at the cost of routing your
observability queries through Grafana’s hosted endpoint rather than your own process.
Token type: don’t reach for the wrong one
The MCP server authenticates to the Grafana HTTP API with a service-account token (glsa_…) —
this is a different credential and a different code path from the glc_-prefixed access-policy
tokens used for Alloy’s remote-write into Mimir/Loki/Tempo. Mixing those up is a known 401 trap on
the write path; for the MCP server specifically, glsa_ is correct because you’re calling the
Grafana API, not writing metrics/logs directly to the data plane.
Cardinality/blast-radius note
Because execute_sql-style generic tools are risky in What is MCP Toolbox, the equivalent consideration
here is scope of the service account token. A token with dashboard-edit and alert-rule-write
permissions handed to an agent means the agent can modify production alerting — scope the service
account to the minimum the agent actually needs (read-only for query/triage agents; write scope only
for agents explicitly meant to remediate).
Why it’s on the backlog: it’s the direct enabler for extending the h-aiops SRE-agent line beyond read-only dashboards into agent-driven triage — pair with What is Grafana Skills to standardize how the agent uses these tools, not just that it can.
Local graph
Linked from 10 notes
What is MCP Toolbox
Google's open-source MCP server for databases (formerly Gen AI Toolbox for Databases) — production-ready (v1.0.0) prebuilt tools that connect agents and IDEs directly to AlloyDB, Spanner, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and more, with OAuth2 zero-trust gating.
What is gcx
Grafana's official CLI for managing Grafana Cloud/Enterprise/OSS resources, optimized for agentic usage — dashboards, alerts, SLOs, metrics/logs/traces/profiles queries, and every major Cloud product, plus a bundled Agent Skills set for Claude Code and other .agents-compatible harnesses.
What is Grafana Skills
Grafana's take on reusable agent skills — captures a team's troubleshooting expertise as standardized, shareable procedures that can trigger MCP actions, plus gcx: a Grafana Cloud CLI shipping 22 bundled skills for Claude Code and other .agents-compatible harnesses.
What is Envoy
CNCF-graduated L7 proxy built at Lyft — the de facto data plane for service mesh (Istio, Linkerd's predecessor lineage) — now extending into AI traffic via Envoy AI Gateway, which reached v1.0 with a native MCP Gateway in 2026.
Agentic AI: Projects & Engineering Mastery
A book-shaped table of contents for Agentic AI: Projects & Engineering Mastery: hands-on practitioner builds, Principal/Staff-level technical leadership, and the lookup appendices and vendor/framework reference notes for the whole series. Book 6 of the AI Systems Engineering series.
What is Harness Engineering
The discipline of designing everything that wraps a raw LLM into a reliable agent — tool contracts, system prompt architecture, context/memory management, permission gates, and feedback loops. Distinct from prompt engineering and model training.
What is HolmesGPT
Robusta.dev's open-source SRE agent (CNCF Sandbox) for investigating production incidents across Kubernetes, VMs, cloud services, and databases — an agentic tool-calling loop over 70+ toolsets, not a chatbot or RAG system, with a proactive 'operator mode' that monitors and opens fix PRs without a human trigger.
What is Vertex AI
Google Cloud's managed ML/AI platform — as of 2026 rebranded and consolidated into the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, bundling 200+ foundation models, Agent Builder, and a managed agent runtime (formerly 'Agent Engine').
Grafana Cloud
A book-shaped table of contents for Grafana Cloud: platform foundations through telemetry collection, Mimir/Loki/Tempo/Pyroscope, visualization, application observability, reliability tooling, developer experience, governance, and enterprise reference architectures — cross-linking existing notes instead of duplicating them.
What is Telegraf
InfluxData's plugin-driven metrics/events/logs collection agent — 300+ input/output plugins, written in Go, single static binary — the collector layer in the InfluxDB (TICK-stack-descendant) ecosystem, comparable in role to Grafana Alloy.
Related notes
What is Grafana Skills
Grafana's take on reusable agent skills — captures a team's troubleshooting expertise as standardized, shareable procedures that can trigger MCP actions, plus gcx: a Grafana Cloud CLI shipping 22 bundled skills for Claude Code and other .agents-compatible harnesses.
What is gcx
Grafana's official CLI for managing Grafana Cloud/Enterprise/OSS resources, optimized for agentic usage — dashboards, alerts, SLOs, metrics/logs/traces/profiles queries, and every major Cloud product, plus a bundled Agent Skills set for Claude Code and other .agents-compatible harnesses.
What is Azure SRE Agent (Microsoft)
Microsoft's AI agent embedded in Azure for autonomous incident response — acknowledges alerts from PagerDuty/ServiceNow/Azure Monitor, investigates via Azure Monitor/App Insights/Kusto, executes configurable Incident Response Plans with tunable autonomy, and learns across incidents via Session Insights.
What is HolmesGPT
Robusta.dev's open-source SRE agent (CNCF Sandbox) for investigating production incidents across Kubernetes, VMs, cloud services, and databases — an agentic tool-calling loop over 70+ toolsets, not a chatbot or RAG system, with a proactive 'operator mode' that monitors and opens fix PRs without a human trigger.