Home
User Guides
  1. Products
  2. Observe AI

MCP Server

Learn how to configure Observe's MCP server to connect to your AI tools.

📘

Note

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is in private preview. Contact your Observe representative for more information or open Help > Contact support in the product and let us know.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for sharing context between AI models and data systems.

The Observe MCP Server lets agentic tools such as Cortex Code, Augment, Cursor, Claude Code, and Claude Desktop connect securely to your Observe tenant so they can investigate incidents, or explore logs, metrics or traces.

OAuth authentication for the MCP Server

The MCP Server connects with your AI tools using OAuth authentication so that your tools can access the Observe platform without Observe ever seeing or storing your credentials.

The following diagram shows how this works.

sequenceDiagram
    participant A as AI Agent / Client
    participant M as MCP Server
    participant B as User Browser
    participant I as Identity Provider

    A->>M: (1) Use Tool?
    M-->>A: Requires Auth

    A->>B: (2) Need Token
    B->>I: (3) Login / Consent
    I-->>B: Authentication Complete

    I-->>A: (4) Auth Code

    A->>I: (5) Exchange Code
    I-->>A: Access Token

    A->>M: (6) Bearer JWT
    M-->>A: Success!

Prerequisites

Verify that the requirements in this section are met before using MCP server.

Required permissions

To set up the MCP Server, you must belong to a group that grants the permissions to create authentication tokens. See Manage groups and members if you need to create or edit a group to grant its members this privilege.

Install Node.js

The Observe MCP Server requires Node.js v18 or higher.

Run the following commands:

brew update
brew install node
brew upgrade node
node -v
📘

Note

If you have multiple versions of Node.js installed, most MCP clients will use the system version that appears first in your PATH. Make sure the system version is 18 or higher.

Configure the Observe MCP server

Perform the following steps to configure the MCP server in Observe:

  1. Click on your user name in the left navigation rail and select Manage account.

  2. Click MCP Server details.

  3. Pick your tool of choice.

  4. Configure the tool to connect to the Observe MCP Server. In this example, click Claude desktop MCP docs and follow the instructions.

  5. Restart your tool.

  6. Start asking questions! For example: What are the top 5 errors in my application?

Troubleshooting

When configuring Cursor, you may see the following messages in your Cursor's MCP list:

[error] No server info found
[info] Handling ListOfferings action, server stored: false 
[info] Server not yet created, returning empty offerings
[info] Handling GetInstructions action

If you do, run the following commands to clear the NPX cache, then restart your Cursor app:

rm -rf ~/.npm/_npx  
npm cache clean --force