Introducing the InfluxDB 3 MCP Server: Natural Language for Time Series

By Gary Fowler / Product,
Jul 09, 2025

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Time series data underpins all real-time systems. From high-resolution telemetry to long-range trends, it’s essential for monitoring, automation, predictive maintenance, and operational insight. But it’s also hard to work with: high cardinality, shifting schemas, and time-based queries make even basic tasks feel heavy.

To address that complexity, we built the InfluxDB MCP server, an open source service that connects InfluxDB 3 to AI tools like Claude Desktop using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It exposes InfluxDB 3 operations over a standardized interface, so you can query data, inspect schema, and manage your database using natural language, without plugins or glue code. As a result, it makes time series data as easy to work with as it is to describe.

The server is available under both the MIT and Apache 2 licenses, and you can run it alongside your LLM agent (such as Claude Desktop), connecting it to the tools you already use.

Manage time series infrastructure without the overhead

Time series workloads involve more than just querying—you’re constantly managing schema, storage limits, and ingestion pipelines. The MCP server helps simplify that complexity by letting you handle core administration operations through natural language. This includes:

  • Database Operations: Create, update, and delete databases with proper validation. Cloud Dedicated users can configure advanced settings, such as table limits, column constraints, and retention policies, directly through natural language conversations.

  • Explore Schemas: Ask questions like, “What measurements do I have in my production database?” or “Show me the schema for the sensor_data table,” and get immediate answers.

  • Manage Tokens: For Core and Enterprise installations, manage admin tokens, create resource-specific tokens with granular permissions, and handle token lifecycle, all through conversational interfaces.

  • Health Monitoring: Check connection status and receive troubleshooting guidance when issues arise.

Because it’s wired into your InfluxDB 3 instance, the server translates these prompts into valid operations using the same APIs you’d call directly:

  • “Create a new database called ‘iot_sensors’ with a 30-day retention period.”
  • “List all my databases and show me their configurations.”
  • “Create a read-only token for the analytics team to access the metrics database.”

Query time series data without writing SQL

Beyond management tasks, the MCP server supports time series data querying through natural language prompts. It analyzes your schema and generates SQL queries with appropriate filters, rollups, and limits. This enables:

  • Exploratory Analysis: AI can examine your data structure, identify patterns, and suggest relevant queries without you needing to know the exact table schemas.

  • Complex Query Generation: Describe what you want to analyze in natural language, and the AI will generate SQL queries, including proper aggregations and time-based groupings, that work efficiently with InfluxDB’s time series optimizations.

  • Automated Reporting: Set up conversations that regularly analyze trends, detect anomalies, or generate summaries of your time series data.

Examples:

  • “Analyze temperature trends from my sensors over the last week and identify any unusual patterns.”
  • “Compare this month’s API response times to last month and show me the 95th percentile differences.”
  • “Find all measurements that haven’t received data in the past 24 hours.”

Run it locally. Stay in control.

The InfluxDB MCP server is designed to run entirely on your machine or local infrastructure. It uses your existing InfluxDB 3 token for authentication—no data is sent to external services. You define which databases are accessible by configuring the server with appropriate tokens and permissions.

The server works with the following InfluxDB 3 products:

You can run it locally using npm or Docker. Just provide your InfluxDB 3 URL and token via environment variables, and the MCP server handles the rest. It’s lightweight and easy to deploy, whether you’re working in a simple local environment or running in production.

Open source and community-driven

The InfluxDB 3 MCP server is designed to be simple, open, and easy to modify. It’s a lightweight bridge between InfluxDB and AI tools, built to make AI-assisted database operations as natural as having a conversation.

You can find it on GitHub. If you hit issues or want to extend it, open a PR or file an issue. We’ll continue to improve it as the ecosystem evolves.