mcp-cloudwatch-explorer

MCP-native AWS CloudWatch explorer. Lets an AI agent (Claude, etc) query metrics, alarms, and logs over MCP — read-only by design — so you can ask "what's wrong with prod?" in a chat and get a useful answer instead of a 4-tab CloudWatch console session.

flowchart LR
    A[Claude / MCP client] -- tool call --> S[mcp-cloudwatch-explorer]
    S -- boto3 cloudwatch / logs --> CW[CloudWatch metrics<br/>alarms · logs]
    CW --> S
    S -- ranked findings --> A

Tools exposed (implemented)

Related MCP server: cloudwatch-mcp

Roadmap

• top_metrics_by_breach(region, hours) — metrics that breached their threshold most in last N hours (needs CloudWatch metric history aggregation)

Why MCP

Standard CloudWatch usage:

1. SSH or open Console.

2. Click through dashboards.

3. Filter by service.

4. Try to remember the metric name.

5. Eyeball the graph.

With MCP:

> Hey, looks like prod is slow. Anything alarming?

[claude calls list_alarms_in_alarm + summarize_health]

Yes — 2 alarms in ALARM right now in us-east-1:
- ALB-5xx-rate (api-prod) breached 3 times in last hour
- RDS-CPUUtilization (db-prod-1) at 87% sustained

Top recent log errors in /aws/lambda/api-prod:
- ConnectionPool exhausted (47x)
- DDB throttling on Users.GetItem (12x)

Probable root cause: connection pool saturation under high traffic
caused by the 5xx rate.

That's a 30-second triage instead of 5 minutes of console-clicking.

Quick start

pip install -e .

# AWS creds via your usual mechanism
export AWS_PROFILE=mycompany-readonly

python -m mcp_cloudwatch_explorer.server

For Claude Desktop, add to your MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "cloudwatch-explorer": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["-m", "mcp_cloudwatch_explorer.server"],
      "env": {"AWS_PROFILE": "mycompany-readonly"}
    }
  }
}

Safety

• Scoped IAM: needs only cloudwatch:Describe*, cloudwatch:Get*, logs:Describe*, logs:FilterLogEvents. Never write.

• No mutation tools. By design.

• Pagination + AWS API throttle handling on every describe_* call.

Related projects

• mcp-postgres-doctor — read-only Postgres diagnostics over MCP.

• mcp-aws-cost-doctor — AWS cost-leak finder over MCP.

The three together cover Postgres + AWS cost + AWS observability for one agent session — a single Claude conversation can audit your DB, your spend, and your alarms.

License

MIT