Connect AI agents to WhaTap via MCP
WhaTap accumulates rich monitoring data, but it's only accessible to people who know "which menu to look at, and how." MCP (Model Context Protocol) dissolves this barrier. When an AI assistant like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini connects to WhaTap via MCP, users can query server CPU, APM TPS, K8s Pod status, or slow queries in a single line of natural language.
Three things MCP changes
① Lower the entry barrier
Old workflow:
"Which menu do I go through to see K8s Pod restart history?"
MCP workflow:
"Show me the Pods that restarted in the last hour."
You can access data without knowing the product's menu structure. New hires, cross-team collaborators, or executives can get answers simply by asking.
② Bring monitoring into AI workflows
Existing AI agents (code writing, document cleanup, issue triage) can now include real-time monitoring data in the loop.
- "Did error rate change after this PR deploy?" → AI estimates deploy time and writes the error-rate comparison report
- "Draft last week's incident postmortem" → auto-collects event history and related traces
- "Pick the event rules with the noisiest Slack alerts" → frequency analysis + tuning proposals
③ Cross-product queries in natural language
Connect multiple domains in one question without switching dashboards:
- "Any API that slowed down during the last 30-minute CPU spike?" — Server × APM
- "Correlate K8s events with the DB connection pool exhaustion timeline" — K8s × DB
Supported clients
| AI client | Vendor | Setup |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Desktop | Anthropic | JSON config file |
| Claude Code | Anthropic | CLI one-liner |
| Codex CLI | OpenAI | CLI or TOML |
| Gemini CLI | CLI or JSON |
Setup details: MCP client setup
Adoption steps
Step 1. Install and connect
- Configure the WhaTap MCP server connection — Getting started with MCP
- Register in the chosen AI client — Client setup
- Set project code (pcode) and API token environment variables — Environment variables
Step 2. First question
The canonical first check is "Show me my project list." If the project code appears, the connection is fine.
Common follow-up question patterns:
| Situation | Example question |
|---|---|
| Server summary | "Summarize server CPU and memory for the last 5 minutes" |
| APM anomaly | "Find agents showing anomalies" |
| Error status | "Summarize errors in the last 5 minutes" |
| K8s check | "Check Pod status" |
| Service relations | "Show the service topology" |
| Auto-generate PromQL | "Write a PromQL query for per-Pod CPU usage" |
| Agent install help | "How do I install the APM agent in project 12345?" |
More examples: Usage examples
Step 3. Weave into team workflows
Once connected, recurring work can be unified in natural language.
- Weekly report draft — "Summarize last week's APM key metrics and fill in the weekly report template" → see the MCP section of the Performance reporting scenario
- Incident response assist — after getting an alert, "Summarize the transaction traces related to this event"
- Self-diagnosis for developers — after deploying, "Any metric change for the service I just deployed?"
Advanced patterns
Integrate with agent pipelines
Once MCP is in place, dev agents like Claude Code or Cursor can use WhaTap data as decision input.
- PR review agent: "Check recent performance trends for services in this PR's scope, then comment"
- Release verification agent: "Auto-compare metrics 1 hour after deploy → create an issue if regression"
Spread within the organization
- Non-engineering roles (PM, QA, execs) can access data in natural language → removes the engineer bottleneck
- Onboarding new hires — before learning the menu structure, let them ask "What does our service look like?"
Custom prompt templates
Save repeat questions as stored prompts and share in the team wiki:
"Summarize incident events for {project} in the last {period}, sort by recurrence count, and add 3 prevention suggestions."
Teammates can reuse the same template verbatim — raising the floor of analysis quality.
Security and scope
- The MCP server authenticates via API token (not shared login credentials)
- Data access is limited to what the token permits → you can restrict to read-only tokens
- AI clients talk to the MCP server locally (the conversation itself follows the AI provider's policy)
Troubleshooting: MCP troubleshooting
Current version & open source
- Version: v1.2.1
- Open source: github.com/whatap/whatap-open-mcp
- Supported tools: 10 (project management 3, data exploration 3, composite analysis 2, install/PromQL 2)
- Supported domains: Server, APM, Kubernetes, Database, Log
Next steps
- Install → Getting started with MCP
- Usage details → Using MCP
- Natural-language example collection → Usage examples
- Combine with report automation → Performance reporting scenario
- Combine with LLM observability → LLM observability deep dive (coming soon)