@digitalronin/healthchecks-io-mcp

Unofficial, unaffiliated with Healthchecks.io. This is a third-party MCP server, not an official Healthchecks.io product.

What this is

Healthchecks.io is a "dead man's switch" style monitoring service: your scheduled jobs (cron jobs, backups, batch scripts, anything that's supposed to run on a schedule) ping it when they run, and Healthchecks.io alerts you if a ping doesn't show up on time — meaning the job silently failed or never ran.

This package is an MCP server — a small local program that lets an AI assistant like Claude talk to Healthchecks.io's Management API on your behalf. Once it's set up, you can ask your AI assistant things like "list my Healthchecks.io checks," "show me the ping history for my backup job," or "pause monitoring for my staging environment" in plain English, and it will call the right Healthchecks.io API endpoint for you.

Setup

1. Get a Healthchecks.io API key

1. Log in to healthchecks.io (or your self-hosted instance, see below).
2. Go to your project's Settings page, then the API Access tab.
3. You'll see two keys: a read-only key and a read-write key.
   • The read-only key can look up your checks, but can't create, change, pause, or delete anything.
   • The read-write key can do everything the read-only key can, plus create, update, pause, resume, and permanently delete checks.

2. Add this server to your MCP client's config

You don't need to install anything manually — npx will download and run it automatically the first time it's used. Add this block to your MCP client's configuration (for Claude Code, this is a .mcp.json file; other clients have their own config file or UI for this):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "healthchecks-io": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["@digitalronin/healthchecks-io-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "HEALTHCHECKS_API_KEY": "your-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace "your-key-here" with the API key from step 1. Restart your MCP client (or reload its MCP connections) after saving this — most clients only pick up new/changed servers on restart.

3. Try it out

Once connected, just ask your AI assistant something like:

• "List all my Healthchecks.io checks"
• "Show me the ping history for my nightly-backup check"
• "Is my staging-cron check currently failing?"

If it responds with real data from your account, you're set up correctly.

Optional: self-hosted Healthchecks.io

Healthchecks.io is open source, and some people run their own instance instead of using the hosted SaaS service at healthchecks.io. If that's you, add a second environment variable pointing at your instance's API root:

"env": {
  "HEALTHCHECKS_API_KEY": "your-key-here",
  "HEALTHCHECKS_BASE_URL": "https://monitoring.example.com/api/v3"
}

The URL must be the full API root, including the /api/v3 path segment, with no trailing slash — e.g. https://monitoring.example.com/api/v3, not https://monitoring.example.com or https://monitoring.example.com/api/v3/. Getting this wrong will make every tool call fail with a "not found" error, since the server appends paths like /checks/ directly onto whatever you set here. If you leave HEALTHCHECKS_BASE_URL unset, it defaults to the real https://healthchecks.io/api/v3.

If your self-hosted instance isn't behind HTTPS, the server will print a warning (but still run) — your API key is sent as a request header on every call, so an http:// URL means that key travels in plaintext over the network to your instance.

What it can do

This server exposes 11 "tools" that your AI assistant can call. They fall into two groups:

Read tools — safe, look-up-only, never change anything:

Tool	What it does
list_checks	List every check in your account.
get_check	Get full details for one specific check.
list_check_pings	Show the recent ping history for a check (when it pinged in, success/fail/etc). Requires a read-write key — see note below.
list_check_flips	Show when a check's status changed (e.g. went from healthy to failing, or back).
list_integrations	List your configured notification integrations (Slack, email, etc). Requires a read-write key — see note below.
list_badges	Get the badge image URLs Healthchecks.io generates for each of your tags (useful for status pages/dashboards).

Mutating tools — these change things in your account, and all of them require a read-write API key:

Tool	What it does
create_check	Create a new check (e.g. "create a check called nightly-backup that expects a ping every 24 hours"). Can optionally be told to match on existing fields (like the check's name) and update that check instead of creating a duplicate — useful if a job might register itself more than once.
update_check	Change an existing check's settings. Only the fields you specify are changed — anything you don't mention stays as it was.
pause_check	Temporarily stop monitoring a check, without deleting it. Requires explicit confirmation — see below.
resume_check	Resume monitoring on a paused check.
delete_check	Permanently delete a check — this cannot be undone. Requires explicit confirmation — see below.

Technical reference

For each tool, this table gives its underlying Healthchecks.io API endpoint:

Tool	Requires read-write key?	Healthchecks.io API endpoint
list_checks	No	GET /api/v3/checks/
get_check	No	GET /api/v3/checks/{uuid}
list_check_pings	Yes	GET /api/v3/checks/{uuid}/pings/
list_check_flips	No	GET /api/v3/checks/{uuid}/flips/
list_integrations	Yes	GET /api/v3/channels/
list_badges	No	GET /api/v3/badges/
create_check	Yes	POST /api/v3/checks/
update_check	Yes	POST /api/v3/checks/{uuid}
pause_check	Yes	POST /api/v3/checks/{uuid}/pause
resume_check	Yes	POST /api/v3/checks/{uuid}/resume
delete_check	Yes	DELETE /api/v3/checks/{uuid}