nifi-clickhouse-kafka-mcp

A read-only MCP server that lets AI assistants look inside Apache NiFi, ClickHouse and Kafka: one server, every environment, and nothing it can break.

Ask Claude, Cursor or any MCP client things like:

• "Why is the orders flow in prod backed up?" → nifi_health finds the full queue, the stopped processor and the error bulletin, worst first.
• "Show me a FlowFile stuck in that queue and where it came from." → nifi_queue, nifi_flowfile, nifi_provenance.
• "Is the billing consumer losing data?" → kafka_consumer_lag flags partitions already behind retention.
• "Find the message for order 42 sent in the last hour." → kafka_search by key, substring or JSON field.
• "Which tables have customer data and how big are they?" → clickhouse_search_columns, clickhouse_describe_table.

It grew out of a gateway built to give a data platform team AI access to NiFi 2, ClickHouse and Strimzi Kafka clusters without handing out credentials or write access.

How it works

flowchart LR
    clients["MCP clients<br/>Claude Code, Claude Desktop,<br/>Cursor, VS Code, ..."]
    idp["OIDC provider<br/>Keycloak, Entra ID, Okta, ..."]
    gw["<b>nifi-clickhouse-kafka-mcp</b><br/>lock 1<br/>───<br/>token + group check<br/>read-only tools<br/>request allowlist<br/>SQL parse check<br/>masking, size caps<br/>audit, metrics"]
    subgraph backends["Lock 2: read-only identities"]
        nifi["NiFi<br/>view-only policies"]
        ch["ClickHouse<br/>readonly user, SELECT grants"]
        kafka["Kafka<br/>Read/Describe ACLs"]
    end
    clients -- "stdio, or HTTP<br/>+ bearer token" --> gw
    clients -. "log in" .-> idp
    gw -. "verify token" .-> idp
    gw --> nifi
    gw --> ch
    gw --> kafka

Each environment (prod, staging, ...) has its own set of backends; one server serves them all.

Why this one

See docs/landscape.md for how this compares with other NiFi, ClickHouse and Kafka MCP servers and which of their users' complaints it answers.

Quick start

Try it against a local NiFi 2, ClickHouse and Kafka:

git clone https://github.com/arogan178/nifi-clickhouse-kafka-mcp && cd nifi-clickhouse-kafka-mcp/examples/demo
docker compose up -d          # NiFi takes about a minute
uv run --with requests python seed_nifi.py
claude mcp add data -- uvx nifi-clickhouse-kafka-mcp --config "$PWD/config.yaml"

Then ask Claude Code "what's wrong in the demo NiFi flow?". examples/demo/README.md has the full walkthrough, including seeding Kafka.

For your own systems, write a config (see examples/config.example.yaml):

masked_fields: [email, phone]
environments:
  prod:
    nifi:
      url: https://nifi.example.com:8443
      auth: {type: mtls, cert: /certs/mcp.pem, key: /certs/mcp.key}
      ca_bundle: /certs/ca.pem
    clickhouse:
      url: https://clickhouse.example.com:8443
      user: mcp_reader
      password: ${CLICKHOUSE_PASSWORD}
    kafka:
      config:
        bootstrap.servers: kafka.example.com:9093
        security.protocol: SASL_SSL
        sasl.mechanism: SCRAM-SHA-512
        sasl.username: mcp-reader
        sasl.password: ${KAFKA_PASSWORD}
      schema_registry: {url: https://registry.example.com}

${VAR} and ${VAR:-default} read environment variables, so secrets stay out of the file. nifi-clickhouse-kafka-mcp --config config.yaml --check validates it and lists the tools it would serve.

Connecting

One person, stdio. The server runs on your machine with your config:

claude mcp add data -- uvx nifi-clickhouse-kafka-mcp --config /path/to/config.yaml

{ "mcpServers": { "data": { "command": "uvx", "args": ["nifi-clickhouse-kafka-mcp", "--config", "/path/to/config.yaml"] } } }

A team, HTTP with OAuth. Run it once (Docker or Kubernetes), and everyone logs in with their own account:

claude mcp add --transport http --client-id nifi-clickhouse-kafka-mcp --callback-port 47130 data https://mcp.example.com/mcp

No identity provider? Put it behind the proxy you already have (oauth2-proxy, Cloudflare Access, Tailscale, ...) and set trusted_user_header to the header that proxy adds; the user still shows up in the audit log.

docs/deploying.md covers the identity provider, proxy mode, the read-only backend identities, Docker, Kubernetes, audit and metrics.

Tools

Tools only appear for systems you configure. Turn any off with disabled_tools (patterns allowed, e.g. kafka_search or nifi_flow*).

Highlights:

• nifi_health: back-pressured connections, invalid processors, controller services that are down, error bulletins and stopped processors, worst first, for a whole flow in one call.
• nifi_flowfile / nifi_provenance_event: attributes and content of real FlowFiles, JSON re-serialized with secrets masked, paged by offset.
• clickhouse_query: one read statement with bound {name:Type} parameters, streamed and cut at a row or size cap, with rows read and elapsed time. ClickHouse's own parser checks every statement first, and only table functions that read ClickHouse itself (numbers, merge, clusterAllReplicas, ...) may run; url, s3, file, remote and the rest are refused.
• clickhouse_health: replicas with problems, disk use, partitions with the most parts, long queries, merges, stuck mutations and recent errors.
• kafka_search: scans every partition for a key, a substring or a JSON field equal to a value, inside a time window, with a scan and time budget and a resume token to continue.
• kafka_sample: messages from an offset, a timestamp or the end, with keys, values and headers decoded (JSON, text, Schema Registry Avro and JSON Schema) and masked.

Security model

The gateway is the first lock. It registers only read tools (each annotated readOnlyHint). The NiFi client can only send GETs plus the temporary queue-listing and provenance requests NiFi needs, and refuses ids that would reach another endpoint. Every ClickHouse statement is parsed by ClickHouse (EXPLAIN AST) before it runs: only SELECT, WITH, SHOW, DESCRIBE, EXISTS and EXPLAIN pass, table functions must be on an allowlist wherever they appear, and the few scalar functions that reach the network or disk (hasColumnInTable, file, ...) are refused. Kafka is only ever read with assign(). Tests fail the build if a write path appears.

The backend is the second lock: give the gateway a NiFi identity with view-only policies, a ClickHouse user with readonly and SELECT grants, and a Kafka user with Read/Describe ACLs. docs/deploying.md has the exact setup for each.

Two choices worth knowing:

• The gateway uses its own identity, not the user's. NiFi 2 authorizes a proxied request on the end user's rights alone, so a gateway that proxies users could write wherever they can. Per-user identity is kept for audit instead.
• Masking is defence in depth, not the boundary. It hides secrets and configured fields in results, and searches (NiFi and Kafka) match against masked values so they can't be used to confirm a hidden one. It works on recognisable shapes, though, and a ClickHouse query can alias a column, so keep truly sensitive data out of reach with backend permissions: NiFi policies, ClickHouse column grants and row policies, Kafka topic ACLs.

Report vulnerabilities as described in SECURITY.md.

Development

uv sync
uv run pytest                                             # unit tests
docker compose -f examples/demo/compose.yaml up -d        # then seed, see examples/demo/README.md
NIFI_CLICKHOUSE_KAFKA_MCP_DEMO=1 uv run pytest tests/integration      # end to end against real NiFi, ClickHouse, Kafka

Roadmap

• Protobuf decoding for Kafka
• NiFi provenance lineage graphs
• Helm chart
• Per-user ClickHouse roles mapped from token claims

License

Apache 2.0