Airflow Diagnostics MCP

Stop asking Claude to trigger DAGs. Start asking it why they failed.

An MCP server that brings AI-powered diagnostics to Apache Airflow. When a DAG fails, most people read logs. We analyze them.

What is this?

Airflow Diagnostics MCP is not another REST API wrapper. Seven servers already do that. Instead, we provide the reasoning layer your LLM needs to actually debug DAGs:

• Root-cause diagnosis — Not just raw logs, but structured findings: "Your task hit OOM because it processed 50GB instead of 2GB"
• Performance regression detection — "This task is 60% slower than last week, here's why"
• Flaky task surfacing — "This sensor fails 65% of the time in a specific way"
• Health audits — Automated checklist for retry storms, zombie tasks, pool starvation, SLA misses
• Optimization suggestions — Rule-based recommendations for parallelism, sensors, and resource allocation

Try it in 60 seconds

1. Start demo Airflow (docker-compose)

cd demo
docker-compose up -d
# Wait for Airflow webserver to be healthy (~30s)
# http://localhost:8081 (admin / admin)

2. Install the MCP server

# Zero-setup (recommended) — uvx runs the published package without installing globally
uvx airflow-diagnostics-mcp

# ...or install locally for development
uv pip install -e .

3. Configure Claude Desktop

Add to ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (or the Cursor / Claude Code equivalent):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "airflow-diagnostics": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["airflow-diagnostics-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "AIRFLOW_REST_API_URL": "http://localhost:8081/api/v1",
        "AIRFLOW_USERNAME": "admin",
        "AIRFLOW_PASSWORD": "admin",
        "AIRFLOW_METADATA_DB_URL": "postgresql://airflow:airflow@localhost:5432/airflow"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. You should now see the Airflow Diagnostics tools available.

4. Trigger a failure and diagnose it

In the Airflow UI (http://localhost:8081):

1. Enable the retry_storm DAG
2. Trigger a run
3. Wait for a task to fail

Then in Claude:

Diagnose the failed run of retry_storm.

You'll get back a structured analysis with root cause, failure chain, and recovery steps.

Demo DAGs included (enable any of them to exercise the matching tool):

DAG	Exercises	Ask Claude
retry_storm	diagnose_failed_run, audit_dag_health	"Why is retry_storm failing?"
slow_regression	analyze_dag_performance	"Is slow_regression getting slower?"
flaky_api_dag	find_flaky_tasks	"Which tasks are flaky?"
pool_starvation	audit_dag_health (pool check)	"Audit pool_starvation for health issues"
heavy_xcom	find_metadata_db_hotspots	"Find metadata DB hotspots"
healthy_etl	baseline comparison	"Compare these two runs"

Tools

diagnose_failed_run(dag_id, run_id?)

Identifies the root cause of a failed DAG run by analyzing logs, checking for known patterns, and examining the failure chain.

Example output:

{
  "root_cause": "Task failed due to excessive retries (5 attempts)",
  "severity": "high",
  "failure_chain": ["flaky_task", "unstable_task"],
  "suggested_actions": [
    "Increase timeout or optimize task logic",
    "Check for transient dependency failures",
    "Review logs for specific error patterns"
  ],
  "evidence": {
    "first_failed_task": "flaky_task",
    "try_number": 5,
    "matched_rules": [...]
  }
}

analyze_dag_performance(dag_id, lookback_days?)

Analyzes performance trends, detects bottlenecks, and flags regressions.

find_flaky_tasks(lookback_days?, min_runs?)

Surfaces tasks with intermittent failures across all DAGs, clusters failure patterns.

audit_dag_health(dag_id, lookback_days?)

Runs a 6-point health checklist: retry storms, sensor failures, zombie tasks (via job.latest_heartbeat), pool starvation (queued latency by pool), SLA misses, and long-tail duration variance. Produces a prioritised HealthReport with overall status (healthy / degraded / unhealthy).

suggest_optimizations(dag_id, lookback_days?)

Composes the health audit and performance analysis, then feeds signals into heuristic rules to produce ranked recommendations: enable retries, parallelise short tasks, migrate long sensors to deferrable operators, move high-concurrency tasks off default_pool, and act on detected health issues. Suggestions are sorted by estimated impact.

compare_runs(dag_id, run_id_a, run_id_b)

Task-level diff between two runs: duration deltas, regressions, state differences.

find_metadata_db_hotspots(top_n?)

Postgres-only. Uses pg_total_relation_size, pg_stat_user_tables, and OCTET_LENGTH(xcom.value) to identify the biggest tables, the DAGs generating the most task instances, and the (DAG, task) pairs pushing large XCom payloads through the DB. Returns concrete cleanup recommendations (airflow db clean targets, remote XCom backend hints). Returns an empty report with a note on non-Postgres backends.

How it's different

Feature	astro-airflow-mcp	airflow-mcp-server	airflow-diagnostics-mcp
List / trigger DAGs	✅	✅	—
Root-cause diagnosis	❌	❌	✅
Performance regression detection	❌	❌	✅
Flaky task surfacing	❌	❌	✅
Health audits	❌	❌	✅
Metadata DB analytics	❌	❌	✅
Reasoning-focused output	❌	❌	✅

We recommend installing this alongside an existing MCP server. Use astro-airflow-mcp or airflow-mcp-server for operations (trigger, pause, clear), and use this server for diagnosis and analysis.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    MCP Client (Claude)                      │
└───────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────┘
                            │ MCP protocol (stdio/HTTP)
┌───────────────────────────▼─────────────────────────────────┐
│              airflow-diagnostics-mcp (FastMCP)              │
│                                                             │
│  ┌─────────────────────┐    ┌───────────────────────────┐   │
│  │  Diagnosis Layer    │    │   Tool Surface (MCP)      │   │
│  │  - rule engines     │◄───┤   diagnose_failed_run     │   │
│  │  - regression calc  │    │   analyze_dag_performance │   │
│  │  - flake detection  │    │   find_flaky_tasks        │   │
│  │  - cost heuristics  │    │   audit_dag_health        │   │
│  └──────────┬──────────┘    │   suggest_optimizations   │   │
│             │                │   compare_runs            │   │
│  ┌──────────▼──────────┐    │   find_metadata_db_...    │   │
│  │   Data Access       │    └───────────────────────────┘   │
│  │   - REST adapter    │                                    │
│  │   - Metadata DB     │                                    │
│  │   - DuckDB cache    │                                    │
│  └──────────┬──────────┘                                    │
└─────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────┘
              │
     ┌────────┴────────┐
     ▼                 ▼
┌──────────┐    ┌─────────────┐
│ Airflow  │    │ Airflow     │
│ REST API │    │ Metadata DB │
│          │    │ (read-only) │
└──────────┘    └─────────────┘

Why two planes:

• REST API alone → paginates, rate-limits, no fast cross-run aggregation
• Metadata DB alone → misses real-time scheduler state
• DuckDB cache → pull relevant slice, run analytics locally, cache with TTL

Configuration

Copy .env.example to .env and update:

# Airflow REST API
AIRFLOW_REST_API_URL=http://localhost:8081/api/v1
AIRFLOW_USERNAME=admin
AIRFLOW_PASSWORD=admin

# Metadata DB
AIRFLOW_METADATA_DB_URL=postgresql://airflow:airflow@localhost:5432/airflow

# Server
LOG_LEVEL=INFO

Supported Airflow versions

• 2.x — Fully supported (tested with 2.8+)
• 3.x — Coming in v1.1

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Areas for expansion:

• v2 features: LLM-powered log analysis for unknown patterns, ML-based suggestions
• More diagnosis rules: cloud-specific errors, data warehouse errors
• Integration tests against various Airflow setups
• UI dashboard (separate project)

License

Apache 2.0 — same as Airflow.

Credits & thanks

This project stands on the shoulders of:

• Astronomer for astro-airflow-mcp and showing what first-class MCP support looks like
• Apache Airflow community for maintaining a genuinely extensible platform
• FastMCP for the fantastic decorator-based MCP framework

Links

• GitHub: github.com/mrjoshuasamuel/airflow-diagnostics-mcp
• PyPI: pypi.org/project/airflow-diagnostics-mcp
• Issues: GitHub Issues