Remote MCP auth for users

[ekbritecore]

If we are deploying the mcp as a helm chart, we are configuring it to talk to grafana with a service account token.

This is allowing it to query but SSE mode is allowing anyone to connect to it (if exposed to the interner), how would we lock down access to the world without putting this behind vpn? Is there a way to required the user's config to also pass an api key or auth rather than allowing anyone to connect?

[sd2k]

It depends what kind of API key you want to accept on the MCP server side really. If you want each user to authenticate separately, you could avoid setting the service account token in the env when running the MCP server, and instead tell users to configure clients to include the GRAFANA_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN header with their own service account (see Cursor docs, for example).

An alternative could be to continue setting the service account token when running the MCP server, and adding support for a shared secret which this MCP server expects and which you distribute to users. It would still need to be set in clients, similar to the Cursor example above. #267 implemented something like this but was closed by the contributor.

I don't know if all clients will allow random headers to be sent unfortunately so I'm not certain how possible this is. Ideally we would support OAuth but there are a few things blocking that (see #151).