| FMRS | 72 / 100 · B | 75 / 100 · B |
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| Reliability | 11 / 20 | 10 / 20 |
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| Security and permissions | 14 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
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| Maintenance | 16 / 20 | 18 / 20 |
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| Documentation | 18 / 20 | 17 / 20 |
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| Setup experience | 13 / 20 | 14 / 20 |
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| Best for | - Teams running a Grafana instance (self-hosted or Grafana Cloud) who want an AI assistant to help with observability workflows
- DevOps/SRE engineers who want to automate querying alerts, logs, and metrics as part of incident response
- Scenarios where monitoring data access needs to be exposed to an AI assistant safely in read-only mode
| - Biomedical researchers
- Clinicians
- AI agents that need efficient access to biomedical literature and data analysis
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| Not for | - Teams with no Grafana ecosystem in place (no Prometheus/Loki/etc. datasources configured)
- Fully offline or network-isolated environments (the remote endpoint and most datasource queries require network access)
- Situations where write access must be tightly scoped but the team is unwilling to configure fine-grained RBAC (the built-in Editor role, while convenient, is broad)
| - Users needing to write to upstream databases (read-only)
- Users requiring direct access to closed datasets (e.g., COSMIC is not directly integrated)
- Users expecting all advanced features without API keys
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| Required permissions | - GRAFANA_URL (required): the target Grafana instance address
- GRAFANA_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN or GRAFANA_USERNAME/GRAFANA_PASSWORD: authentication credentials (the service account token is sensitive)
- Grafana RBAC permissions matching the enabled tool categories, e.g. dashboards:read/write, datasources:query, alert.rules:read/write, annotations:read/write, or the built-in Editor role as a simpler but broader alternative
- Grafana Incident and Sift tools use basic roles (Viewer for reads, Editor for writes) rather than fine-grained RBAC
- Optional GRAFANA_ORG_ID or X-Grafana-Org-Id header for multi-organization support
- Optional GRAFANA_EXTRA_HEADERS and GRAFANA_FORWARD_HEADERS to add or forward HTTP headers (e.g. Cookie) to the Grafana API
| - Requires internet access to query public biomedical APIs
- Optional API keys (NCBI, Semantic Scholar, OpenFDA, etc.) to improve rate limits or unlock features
- Local read/write access for skills, cache, and local study data (e.g., `~/.local/share/biomcp`)
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| Risks and side effects | - Service account tokens, passwords, and other credentials are supplied via environment variables or headers and must be safeguarded from leakage
- Write tools (update_dashboard, alerting_manage_rules, create_incident, create_annotation, create_snapshot, etc.) can directly modify or delete dashboards, alert rules, and incident data — misuse can damage production configuration
- Using the built-in Editor role for convenience grants broad access beyond least-privilege
- Fetching full dashboard JSON (get_dashboard_by_uid, update_dashboard) can consume significant context window space and may expose sensitive queries or variables embedded in the dashboard
- GRAFANA_FORWARD_HEADERS forwarding of headers like Cookie, if misconfigured, risks leaking session information
- The hosted remote endpoint https://mcp.grafana.com/mcp is a third-party managed service — using it to reach a Grafana Cloud instance routes requests through that service
- SSE/streamable-http transport misconfiguration (e.g. --allowed-hosts or --allowed-origins set to * while exposed on an untrusted network) carries DNS-rebinding-style risk
| - Upstream API rate limits may affect performance
- Some data sources (e.g., KEGG) have licensing terms that restrict non-academic use
- Features requiring API keys (e.g., OncoKB) may be incomplete without them
- Local binary installations need regular updates for compatibility
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| Supported clients | Claude Desktop, Cursor | Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, Other MCP stdio clients |
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| Tools | 92 | 11 |
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