Manage Your Dead Man's Switches from Claude, Cursor, or Any AI Assistant

Your AI Assistant Can Manage Your Monitors Now

TL;DR: The DeadPing MCP server exposes 11 tools that let AI assistants like Claude, Cursor, and Windsurf create monitors, check status, search captured output, list anomalies, and investigate incidents through natural language. Setup takes 30 seconds with an npm install and an API key.

We shipped an MCP server for DeadPing. If you use Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, or any other AI tool that supports Model Context Protocol, you can now manage your dead man's switch monitors without leaving your editor or chat window.

No new dashboard tab. No context switching. Just tell your AI assistant what you want and it does it.

What You Can Actually Do

The MCP server exposes 11 tools. Here's what that looks like in practice:

"Show me which monitors are down right now"
→ list_monitors(status: "down")

"Create a monitor for my nightly ETL job that runs every day at 2am"
→ create_monitor(name: "nightly-etl", cron_expression: "0 2 * * *")

"What happened during last night's incident?"
→ list_incidents(status: "resolved") → get_incident(id: "...")

"Search for 'connection refused' in recent job output"
→ search_output(query: "connection refused")

"Pause the billing-sync monitor while I deploy"
→ update_monitor(id: "...", paused: true)

"Resume it"
→ update_monitor(id: "...", paused: false)

The AI handles the tool selection, parameter mapping, and result formatting. You just ask questions in plain English.

Why This Is Useful (Not Just Cool)

The obvious pitch is convenience. But the real value is in the workflows it unlocks:

Incident Investigation Without Context Switching

You're debugging a production issue in your terminal. Something is broken and you suspect a background job stopped running. Instead of opening DeadPing in a browser, finding the right monitor, checking the timeline, and reading through captured output – you ask your AI:

"Is the payment-processor monitor healthy?
If not, show me the last 5 pings with their exit codes and output."

Your AI calls list_monitors, finds the right one, calls list_pings with the monitor ID, and shows you the exit codes, durations, and captured stderr – all without leaving your editor. You stay in flow.

Monitor-as-Code in Your Deploy Scripts

You're adding a new cron job to your infrastructure. With MCP, your AI can create the DeadPing monitor for it in the same session where you write the code:

You: "I just added a new cron job to clean up expired sessions
      every hour. Create a DeadPing monitor for it."

AI: Created monitor "session-cleanup" with schedule "0 * * * *"
    and 5-minute grace period.

    Ping URL: https://deadping.io/api/ping/abc123...

    Add this to the end of your cleanup script:
    curl -fsS "https://deadping.io/api/ping/abc123?exit_code=$?"}

The monitor exists before you even push the code. No separate setup step to forget about.

Bulk Triage During Outages

When something goes wrong and multiple monitors are down, the last thing you want to do is click through a dashboard one monitor at a time. With MCP:

"List all monitors that are currently down.
For each one, show me when it last pinged
and what the captured output says."

Your AI fetches all the data in one shot and presents it in a readable format. You can immediately see if the failures are related (same error across all monitors) or independent.

Setup Takes 30 Seconds

Generate an API key from your dashboard settings, then add the MCP server config to your AI tool:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "deadping": {
      "url": "https://deadping.io/api/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "X-API-Key": "dp_live_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

That's it. No npm install, no local server to run. DeadPing hosts the MCP server at deadping.io/api/mcp using the Streamable HTTP transport, so it works with any MCP-compatible client out of the box.

See the full MCP docs for setup instructions for Cursor, Windsurf, and other clients.

The 11 Tools

For reference, here's everything the MCP server can do:

Available on All Plans

MCP server access is included on Free, Pro, and Business plans. The only tool that requires a paid plan is search_output, which needs Pro or Business for the underlying full-text search capability.

If you're already using DeadPing, generate an API key and try asking your AI assistant about your monitors. If you're not, sign up free – 20 monitors, no credit card.