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Datum offers two Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for AI tools: Most agents benefit from both: Docs MCP to learn how Datum works, and Datum MCP to act on your projects. Datum’s official MCP server connects AI tools to your Datum projects. It gives an agent tools to read and change your resources, and to diagnose problems with them, with the same permissions as your own account. Datum MCP covers:
  • Organizations, projects, and users.
  • Networking: domains, load balancers and their routes, gateways, traffic protection, DNS zones and records, and gVPC networks.
  • Compute workloads and Instances.
  • IP address management, IAM, billing, and services.
  • Activity, to search your project’s audit history.
  • Any other Datum resource, through a generic escape hatch.
For load balancers, networks, Compute, DNS, and activity, Datum MCP also gives the agent each service’s own diagnostic tools and guides. These are the same tools that Patch, Datum’s own assistant, uses.
Prefer the terminal? datumctl assistant answers questions in natural language without a separate MCP client. See AI assistant. For how the CLI docs frame this server, see Connecting an AI client with the MCP server.

Install

To upgrade later, run brew upgrade datum-mcp.

Add it to your AI client

--scope user makes it available in every project. Leave it off to add it to the current project only.
On Windows, point your client’s configuration at the full path, such as "command": "C:\\tools\\datum-mcp.exe".

Sign in

The first time an agent uses Datum MCP, the server opens your browser to sign in with OAuth 2.1 (PKCE), and stores the credentials in your system keychain. After that, it refreshes the token automatically. To run without a browser or keychain, such as in CI or an agent-hosted deployment, set both DATUM_TOKEN and DATUM_API_HOSTNAME (for example, api.datum.net). With a service account’s token, the server works in that service account’s own project automatically.

Get started in a conversation

Ask your agent to set up its context first. It checks what’s already selected, then picks an organization and project:
  1. context shows the current organization and project.
  2. organizations lists your organizations and selects one.
  3. projects lists the organization’s projects and selects one.
The onboard-to-project prompt does all three for you. After that, ask for what you need, such as “why is my load balancer not serving?” or “create a DNS zone for example.com”.

Toolsets

To keep the agent’s tool list short, Datum MCP loads only its core tools and the alb, dns, and network toolsets when it starts. The agent loads others, such as compute, vpc, activity, ipam, iam, billing, services, search, or resource, with the toolsets tool when a task needs them, without a restart. To see every toolset, run datum-mcp --list-toolsets. To change what loads at startup, set DATUM_MCP_ENABLE_TOOLSETS, such as dns,compute or all. To rule a toolset out entirely, set DATUM_MCP_DISABLE_TOOLSETS, such as billing,iam.

Prompts

Datum MCP includes ready-made prompts for common tasks, such as:
  • deploy-http-proxy — put a load balancer in front of a backend.
  • configure-dns — create a DNS zone for a domain.
  • alb-not-serving, alb-certificate-not-issued, alb-hostname-not-working, and other diagnostic prompts for load balancers, networks, Compute, DNS, and activity.
For every tool and prompt, see the tool reference.

Hand off to Patch

For an open-ended diagnostic question, or a risky change that touches several resources, Patch can be a better fit than the MCP server’s resource tools. The Datum MCP repository includes a Claude Code skill that teaches an agent when to hand a task to Patch through datumctl assistant. To use it, copy it into your project’s .claude/skills/ directory, or ~/.claude/skills/ to use it everywhere.

Run over HTTP

By default, your AI client starts Datum MCP and talks to it over standard input and output. To serve it over streamable HTTP instead, so a client connects by URL, run the following command:
The HTTP mode has no authentication of its own. Every request runs with this process’s Datum credentials, so it listens only on localhost unless you add --allow-non-loopback. Only do that behind your own access control.

Datum Docs MCP

Datum also hosts a read-only MCP server for its documentation, at https://www.datum.net/docs/mcp. It needs no installation and no sign-in, and it only reads published docs. Add it to an agent so that it can answer questions about Datum from the current documentation instead of from what it remembers. It provides three tools:
  • search_datum_cloud_docs — search the documentation, including code examples, API references, and guides.
  • query_docs_filesystem_datum_cloud_docs — read pages and Datum’s OpenAPI specs through a read-only, virtual filesystem.
  • submit_feedback — report a page that’s wrong, outdated, or confusing to the docs team.
For other clients, use the streamable HTTP transport with the URL https://www.datum.net/docs/mcp. To fetch the docs without MCP, see llms.txt.
Last modified on October 23, 2026