Leaving the three diagnostic tools keyless is a real design decision rather than a trial: "is this site up, and is its certificate about to expire" is answerable the moment the server is added. Once a key is in place the same conversation creates the monitor and acknowledges the incident it later raises.
The official MCP server for Drumbeats, which watches background jobs and endpoints — cron jobs, queues, scheduled tasks and HTTP checks — and raises an incident when something stops checking in. Monitors and incidents need an account; the three diagnostic checks do not.
- check_http, check_ssl and check_dns — is the URL reachable and how fast, when does the certificate expire and who issued it, and what does the hostname resolve to; all three work with no account and no key
- list_projects, create_project and update_project — the projects that group monitors, incidents and notification settings
- create_monitor — one tool for all four kinds: a cron job on a schedule, a basic event-driven job, a heartbeat, or an HTTP uptime check
- list_monitors, get_monitor and update_monitor — find a monitor, read its type, status and schedule, and patch only the fields you change
- pause_monitor and resume_monitor — stop checks and alerts, then restart them
- get_monitor_history — recent pings, warnings, checks or response times for one monitor
- get_uptime_summary — project-wide uptime and SLA across every uptime monitor, with per-monitor figures over a lookback window
- list_incidents and manage_incident — downtime and missed-run events newest first, filterable by status, and one tool to read, acknowledge or resolve one
Node.js 22 when running via npx -y @drumbeats/mcp over stdio; Claude Desktop can install the .mcpb bundle instead. The monitoring tools need an account-scoped API key (dk_...) in DRUMBEATS_API_KEY, from Account > API keys; creating projects also needs the manage_projects scope. Leave the key unset and the HTTP, SSL and DNS checks still work. Self-hosted deployments override the service URLs through DRUMBEATS_API_BASE_URL and the per-service variables.
One command plus a key — npx -y @drumbeats/mcp, then supply credentials