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Private beta: AI SRE is currently in private beta. Pro or higher accounts can apply for free beta access through the AI SRE private beta application form; after approval, Flashduty will add your account to the whitelist. Features and the UI may change during the beta.

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Overview

MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets AI SRE agents connect to external tools and data sources. Each MCP server is a standardized endpoint that exposes a set of tools (functions) — for example, querying GitHub issues, sending Slack messages, reading Kubernetes resources, or retrieving metrics from an observability platform. Once you configure and enable an MCP server in the console, agents will autonomously decide when they need an external capability during incident investigation and call the corresponding tool directly — no manual data-shuttling required.
This page covers the “MCP” section inside the AI SRE console — that is, third-party MCP servers that agents call (you bring external tools in for agents to use).This is different from the Flashduty MCP Server in the developer docs: that is Flashduty’s own outbound MCP service, which lets you connect Flashduty’s capabilities into third-party AI clients (such as Claude or Cursor). One direction is “agents calling external services”; the other is “external clients calling Flashduty” — they are opposite flows, not the same thing.

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What Is MCP

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol that describes in a uniform way “what tools a server exposes, what parameters each tool accepts, and what it returns.” Think of it as the “USB port” of the AI agent world — any MCP-compliant server can be discovered and called plug-and-play by an agent, with no per-system adapter code required. In AI SRE, MCP extends an agent’s capability from “built-in tools” to “any external system”:
  • You add an MCP server in the console (declaring its endpoint, transport, and authentication).
  • At session start, enabled servers visible in the current scope become available to the agent.
  • When needed, the agent discovers the tools that server provides and calls them directly.
MCP vs. Skills: MCP provides the ability to connect external tools; a Skill provides the methodology for orchestrating those tools to accomplish a class of tasks. A Skill can declare which MCP server tool it needs inside SKILL.md using mcp:server/tool notation. See Skills for details.

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Installing MCP Servers from the Marketplace

Go to Plugins → MCP and click Browse Marketplace to open the MCP Directory, where you can browse Flashduty’s curated selection of third-party MCP server templates.
1

Open the directory

Click Browse Marketplace on the MCP list page to open a directory dialog that displays all available MCP server templates in a card grid. Each card shows the MCP server name, author, description, and tags.
2

View details

Click any MCP server card to open the detail view, which shows the full description, transport, authentication mode, whether a BYOC Runner is required, the vendor, connection parameter documentation, and a link to the vendor’s official docs. Cards for already-installed MCP servers display a gear icon; clicking it takes you directly to that server’s edit form.
3

Start an install conversation

For MCP servers not yet installed, click the Install button on the card. The system opens a new AI SRE session and injects the server’s template metadata. The agent then guides you through entering the endpoint URL, completing credential authorization, and calls tool_search (probing the server’s tools by name) to verify connectivity — the entire install flow happens inside the conversation, not through a one-click write to the database.
4

Confirm the installation

Once the agent verifies connectivity, it writes the MCP server into the account via the /safari/mcp/server/create endpoint. The server then appears in the MCP list and is marked as “Installed” on the catalog card.
The marketplace directory is browse-only — there is no one-click install endpoint. This is intentional: installing an MCP server must involve credential entry and connectivity verification. Skipping those steps would leave dead configurations in the account that can never actually connect. Conversational install ensures every MCP server has been validated by a real agent invocation before it is considered ready.
Installed MCP servers record a source_template_name field that points back to the originating template, making it easy to trace the server’s provenance later. If the same template is installed more than once (for example, into different team scopes), each installation creates an independent MCP server instance.
MCP servers marked requires Runner (shown by the requires_runner flag in the detail view; requires_runner is independent of transport, and the entire current curated catalog is HTTP Streaming and needs no Runner) can only be used in environments where you have a BYOC Runner deployed; cloud Sandboxes do not support them. Before installing, confirm your account has a working BYOC Runner configured. See Environments (BYOC).

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Adding an MCP Server

Go to Plugins → MCP, click Add Server in the top-right corner, and fill in the form to define an MCP server.

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Basic Fields

Each MCP server also has an AI description: after an agent first lists a server’s tools, the system automatically generates a capability summary from the tool list and displays it in the console. This summary refreshes automatically as the tool set changes — no manual maintenance needed.

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Transport

stdio is only available for BYOC environments (Runner deployed on your own machine). Cloud Sandboxes cannot launch local subprocesses. If you are using a cloud environment, use HTTP Streaming or SSE instead, and ensure the MCP server is reachable from the Sandbox network. For differences between environments, see Environments (BYOC).
There is a default timeout for both connection and tool calls: 10 seconds for connection, 60 seconds for tool invocation.
Use “Skip TLS certificate verification” only when the remote HTTPS MCP server uses a self-signed certificate and the network is controlled. After you enable it, the agent execution environment skips certificate-chain and hostname verification when connecting to that server. Do not use it for untrusted public endpoints.

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Authentication

MCP servers support three authentication modes that determine how credentials are provided to the server:
All users share the same credentials. Credentials are written directly into the server configuration — for HTTP/SSE transport, in the Headers (JSON) (e.g., { "Authorization": "Bearer xxx" }); for stdio transport, in the environment variables (JSON) (e.g., { "API_KEY": "xxx" }). Suitable for internal systems accessed with account-level service tokens.
For “Per-User API Key” and “Per-User OAuth”, if credentials are missing the agent’s tool call is paused and a credential entry or authorization dialog is shown to the current user; execution resumes once credentials are supplied. In Shared mode, no credentials are requested from the user.

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MCP Server Authorization (Settings)

Per-User API Key and per-user OAuth credentials are isolated per user, so besides the inline “prompted on demand during a conversation” path above, you can also manage your own authorization for an MCP server directly in settings — both paths write to the same per-user credential. Auth-status chip in the list: the MCP list shows a per-viewer auth-status chip for each MCP server, reflecting the current viewer’s credential. The wording depends on the authentication mode — since a saved Per-User API Key is never verified for validity, it deliberately avoids the word “Connected”:
  • Per-User OAuth: ● Connected (a valid credential is saved) / ○ Disconnected (no credential provided yet).
  • Per-User API Key: ● Saved (a key is saved) / ○ Not set (no key provided yet).
  • Shared across both modes: ⚠ Expired (the credential has expired — OAuth token lapsed — and needs re-authorization).
Shared-mode MCP servers have no per-user authorization step and render a dash (”—”). For a server that needs your personal credential, open the Credential dialog from its authorization entry in the list. It manages only your credential and never changes the server endpoint, authentication mode, or scope. Actions in the Credential dialog: the dialog offers actions based on its authentication mode and your current credential state:
  • Per-User OAuth: first choose an execution environment, then click Authorize (when disconnected) / Reauthorize (when connected or expired). Choose a Cloud Sandbox or an online BYOC Runner; Auto is not available. OAuth discovery, Dynamic Client Registration, token exchange, and later refreshes all run from that environment. On each open, the dialog prefers the last successful environment if it is still online, then an online runner bound to the connector, and finally the Cloud Sandbox. For an OAuth service reachable only on a private network, choose a BYOC Runner that can reach it. A browser popup then opens the authorization window (initiated via /safari/credentials/oauth/initiate, which returns an authorize URL opened in the popup).
  • Per-User API Key: click Enter Key (when disconnected) / Update Key (when connected) to open the secret-entry modal, which submits to /safari/credentials/secret.
  • Revoke: when a credential exists, click Revoke (via /safari/credentials/revoke) to delete your saved credential; the status returns to Disconnected.
OAuth authorization completes through a browser bounce page at /oauth-callback: the authorization server calls back to fc-safari, which then 302-redirects to the bounce page; the page postMessages the result to the window that initiated the flow (the settings page or the chat page) and closes itself automatically. No manual token copy-pasting is required.

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Management & Inspection

The MCP list displays each server’s name (including its AI description), scope (account or team name), transport, an enabled toggle, and an actions column — the list only contains MCP servers you have added to the account; the built-in Flashduty MCP server is injected by the runtime and does not appear in this list, see “Inspection” below. The scope filter bar at the top lets you switch between All / Account / Team views.
Toggle the switch in the list. Only enabled servers are available to the agent; disabled servers are invisible to agents and cannot be called.
Click the edit button (or click the row) to open the form. You can modify the name, transport, description, endpoint/command, authentication mode, and scope. If you do not have edit permission, the form opens in read-only mode with an explanation.
Removes the MCP server from the current scope. Agents that depend on it will no longer be able to access its tools, and active sessions currently using it will fail. A confirmation prompt is shown before deletion.

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Inspection: Viewing the Tools a Server Exposes

The tools an MCP server exposes are discovered during a session by agents on demand — not displayed statically in the console. This is because the same MCP server may have different reachability and tool sets across different environments (Runners); connection state and tool count are per-environment properties, not global ones.
To confirm which tools a given MCP server actually exposes in a particular environment, the most direct way is to ask the agent in Chat to list that server’s tools — it will show the tools and how to use each one. See Conversations.
Reading Flashduty incidents, alerts, and other data is a built-in agent capability: the Flashduty MCP server is injected directly into the agent at the start of every session by the runtime, bypassing this page’s MCP server list API — it does not appear in the server list above, and there is nothing to configure, enable, or view here for it. This capability is maintained by the platform and is available to every account by default.

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Scope

MCP shares the same two-level scope model as other resources (Skills, Knowledge Packs, Agents, Environments), divided into account level and team level: Edit permissions: Account owners or account admins can edit any MCP server; team members can edit team-level MCP servers that belong to their team. There is no creator-retains-rights exception. When you lack edit permission, the toggle and action buttons for that row appear as read-only. Create and reassign: to create a new team-level MCP server, you must belong to the target team; account-level creation is limited to the account owner or admins. When editing an existing MCP server, the account owner or admins can move it to any team to recover resources left behind by empty teams or departed members; regular members can move it only to teams they belong to. Runtime visibility: At session start, the agent is offered only account-level MCP servers and servers belonging to the team bound to the current session. Once the agent reads a team’s knowledge during an investigation, that team’s MCP servers and Skills are mounted into the session on demand. The account is the only security boundary at runtime; the team is an ownership and editing tag only.

Skills

Skills call MCP-provided tools inside SKILL.md using the mcp:server/tool notation.

Agent

Agents share the same authentication modes and scope model as MCP.

BYOC

stdio MCP servers must run on a BYOC Runner; learn the difference between cloud Sandbox and self-hosted environments.

Console

Observe how agents inspect and invoke MCP tools during a session.

Flashduty MCP Server (Developer)

The opposite direction: the official MCP service for connecting Flashduty into third-party AI clients.