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MCP Servers

NAbox comes ready to integrate with your AI ecosystem with 3 MCP servers :

MCP servers are typically configured into your own LLM interface to bring knowledge about external sources.

NAbox MCP servers are currently served over simple http to avoid complex SSL configuration regarding certificate verification, but please contact assistance to improve this.

You should create authentication token to configure access to MCP servers, under Settings > Security > API Tokens you can create authentication tokens attached to different scopes. Each MCP server has its own scope, but you can define a single token for multiple scopes.

Once you have a token created, it must be used as a Bearer token in MCP requests. This is a fairly common parameter for MCP clients, either by manually configuring HTTP Header Authorization: Bearer xxxx, or directly if the client supports bearer tokens.

MCP Server Endpoint Comment
Harvest http://nabox/mcp/harvest/ Mandatory trailing /
ONTAP. http://nabox/mcp/ontap/ Mandatory trailing /
Grafana http://nabox/mcp/grafana NO trailing /

You will find below a description of what the different MCP servers do.

Harvest MCP Server

Harvest MCP Server is a read only interface that connects MCP clients to your infrastructure monitoring data collected by Harvest from ONTAP, StorageGRID, E-Series and Cisco Nexus Switches.

The Harvest MCP server allows you to ask natural language questions about your infrastructure monitoring data. Here are some example queries:

Simple Health Checks

  • "What's the overall health of my infrastructure?"
  • "Are there any active alerts I should know about?"

Capacity Analysis

  • "Which volumes are running out of space?"
  • "Show me the top 5 volumes by utilization"
  • "Analyze storage growth trends over the past month"

Performance Investigation

  • "Which systems are experiencing high latency?"
  • "Which volumes have performance issues?"
  • "Show me performance bottlenecks across my clusters"

This MCP server only interacts with the metrics database, not with ontap directly so it is safe by nature : it cannot interact with ONTAP systems.

Note

When configuring this MCP server, you must use http://nabox/mcp/harvest/ (with trailing slash)

ONTAP MCP Server

The ONTAP Model Context Protocol (MCP) server provides MCP clients like GitHub Copilot, Claude Desktop, and other large language models (LLMs) access to your NetApp ONTAP storage systems. Create automation tools enabling self-service provisioning and lifecycle management.

Supports multi-cluster management, volume lifecycle operations, data protection policies, and NFS/CIFS access control.

Use Cases:

  • AI-Assisted Storage Management: Direct integration with AI assistants via MCP
  • Self-Service Provisioning: Allow users to provision and manage storage resources through natural language commands.
  • Data Protection: Automated snapshot policy management
  • Multi-Cluster Management: Manage multiple ONTAP clusters through a single MCP interface.
  • Custom Workflows: Create custom workflows and automations tailored to your specific storage environment.

ONTAP MCP Server is configured with the same systems as those configured in NAbox.

It's important to understand ONTAP MCP Server does interact with ONTAP systems directly, and can potentially take destructive actions. It's scope is limited to the privileges attached to the user used to configure the system in NAbox.

Note

When configuring this MCP server, you must use http://nabox/mcp/ontap/ (with trailing slash)

Grafana MCP Server

Grafana MCP Server provides comprehensive access to your NAbox Grafana instance, allowing you to interact with dashboards, datasources, alerting, and observability data through your AI assistant.

It enables queries like "Show me the top 5 volumes by IOPS" (Prometheus queries), "Search for error patterns in the last hour" (Loki logs), or "Create a dashboard for monitoring SVM performance". The server also supports managing Grafana resources such as annotations, snapshots, and alert rules.

Key capabilities include:

  • Dashboard operations: Search, view, create, and update dashboards with support for panel queries
  • Alerting: List, create, update, and manage alert rules and notification policies
  • Annotations and snapshots: Create markers and save dashboard states for incident tracking
  • Navigation: Generate accurate deeplinks to Grafana resources

Grafana MCP Server has both read and write capabilities. While it can safely query metrics and logs, it can also modify dashboards, create alerts, and change Grafana configuration.

Note

When configuring this MCP server, you must use http://nabox/mcp/grafana (without trailing slash)