Tickstem MCP

What tickstem/mcp does

tickstem/mcp exposes Tickstem infrastructure management through the Model Context Protocol. It connects an MCP-compatible coding assistant or agent to four service areas: cron jobs, HTTP uptime monitors, heartbeat monitors, and email verification.

Cron tools let an agent inspect account jobs, register new schedules with a name, schedule, and endpoint, modify selected fields, control whether a job runs, and remove jobs. Execution history can be queried with the most recent records first. Uptime tools cover monitor lifecycle operations and recent check results, including HTTP status, duration, errors, and SSL expiry information.

Heartbeat monitors act as dead-man's switches for scheduled or recurring work. An agent can configure the expected interval and grace period, pause alerting during planned downtime, record a successful run with a token, and inspect recent pings. Email verification checks syntax, MX records, disposable-domain status, and whether an address uses a role-based prefix.

How it works

The tickstem/mcp MCP server is a local Go process that speaks MCP over standard input and output. The client starts the process and passes the Tickstem API key through its environment. Most account-level operations use that key; ping_heartbeat is different because the heartbeat token serves as its credential and the tool does not require an API key.

Monitor assertions can be supplied when creating an uptime monitor. All supplied conditions must pass for a check to count as up. Supported assertion sources are HTTP status code, response time in milliseconds, and response body. Comparisons include equality and inequality operators for numeric sources, while body checks also support contains and not-contains comparisons.

Setup and configuration

Install a released platform binary or build the command with Go:

• Download the appropriate tsk-mcp binary from the project's releases, make it executable on macOS or Linux, and place it on PATH.
• Run go install github.com/tickstem/mcp/cmd/tsk-mcp@latest.

Set TICKSTEM_API_KEY to a key from the Tickstem application, then start tsk-mcp. TICKSTEM_BASE_URL is optional and can point the server at another API endpoint, such as a local development URL. MCP clients need a server entry that invokes the tsk-mcp command and supplies the environment variable.

Tools and capabilities

The tool set includes:

• Cron job listing, lookup, registration, partial updates, pausing, resuming, deletion, and execution-history queries.
• Uptime monitor creation with optional status-code, response-time, and body assertions, plus lifecycle and check-history operations.
• Heartbeat creation, lookup, configuration updates, pause/resume controls, deletion, authenticated ping recording, and ping-history queries.
• Email verification and account-level verification-history lookup.

The tickstem/mcp MCP server is suited to assistants that need to provision monitoring resources while developing an application, review operational results conversationally, or connect a scheduled job to a heartbeat check.

Limitations and notes

Deleting a cron job also removes its execution history. Deleting a monitor removes its check history, and deleting a heartbeat removes its ping history, so these operations are not reversible through the listed tools. Pausing a job prevents it from firing; pausing a monitor stops polling; pausing a heartbeat suppresses alerts until it is resumed.

The server manages Tickstem resources but is not a replacement for the language SDKs listed by the project for application code. The README documents integrations with Claude, Cursor, Copilot, and other MCP-compatible agents, but does not specify client-specific behavior beyond the standard MCP-over-stdio setup.