MCP Dead Man's Snitch

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Dead Man's Snitch monitoring service. This server enables AI assistants like Claude to interact with Dead Man's Snitch to monitor scheduled tasks and cron jobs.

What it does

This MCP server provides tools to:

• List and search your monitoring snitches
• Check in (ping) snitches to confirm tasks are running
• Create new monitors for your scheduled jobs
• Update, pause, or delete existing monitors
• Manage tags for organizing your snitches

Installation & Setup

1. Get your API key from Dead Man's Snitch account settings

2. Configure your MCP client by adding this to your settings:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "deadmansnitch": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["mcp-deadmansnitch"],
      "env": {
        "DEADMANSNITCH_API_KEY": "your_api_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Nix / NixOS

For Nix users, this project provides a flake with packages, overlays, and a development shell:

# Run directly
nix run github:jamesbrink/mcp-deadmansnitch

# Build the package
nix build github:jamesbrink/mcp-deadmansnitch

See NIX.md for detailed NixOS configuration and declarative usage.

Docker

A Docker image can be built from the Nix flake:

# Build and load the image
nix build github:jamesbrink/mcp-deadmansnitch#docker
docker load < result

# Run the server
docker run --rm -e DEADMANSNITCH_API_KEY="your_api_key" mcp-deadmansnitch:latest

Configure your MCP client to use Docker:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "deadmansnitch": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "--rm", "-i", "-e", "DEADMANSNITCH_API_KEY", "mcp-deadmansnitch:latest"],
      "env": {
        "DEADMANSNITCH_API_KEY": "your_api_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Available Tools

This MCP server exposes a single unified snitch tool with an action parameter to reduce context usage when connecting to LLMs.

snitch

Manage Dead Man's Snitch monitors with the following actions:

Action	Description	Required Params	Optional Params
list	List all snitches	-	tags (filter)
get	Get snitch details	token	-
create	Create new snitch	name, interval	notes, tags, alert_type, alert_email
update	Update snitch	token	name, interval, notes, tags, alert_type, alert_email
delete	Delete snitch	token	-
pause	Pause monitoring	token	until (ISO 8601)
unpause	Resume monitoring	token	-
check_in	Send check-in	token	message
add_tags	Add tags	token, tags	-
remove_tag	Remove a tag	token, tag	-

Valid intervals: 15_minute, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly

Valid alert_types: basic, smart

Example Usage in Claude

Once configured, you can ask Claude:

• "List all my Dead Man's Snitch monitors"
• "Create a daily monitor called 'Database Backup'"
• "Check in the backup-job snitch"
• "Pause the deployment monitor for 2 hours"
• "Show me all snitches tagged with 'production'"

Support

• GitHub Issues
• Dead Man's Snitch API Docs
• MCP Documentation

License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.