There’s been an exciting development since my last post on MCP – HPE Mist has now released publicly hosted MCP servers in public beta! Check out the how-to guide and the target URL here:
The walkthrough that engineering has posted shows how to integrate this with Claude but you are not limited to just Claude – many platforms are introducing support for MCP client functionality. In this blogpost I’ll show you an example of how you can use these new tools to perform automated triage and reconnaissance on the network as the alerts come in.
In this example I’ll be combining Mist with Anthropic, n8n, and Orb. n8n is a low-code platform that makes it easy to stitch together automation workflows. Orb is an exciting new project founded by network measurement veterans that continuously measures latency, packet loss, jitter and internet speed. Anthropic provides the LLM to sift through the data and provide recommendations.
Mist has an extensive alerting framework and can be configured to send webhooks for events ranging from catastrophic to informational. In this case, I’ll be testing with an AP Offline event. As an AP goes offline in my organization it will trigger a webhook to n8n so that it can begin the evaluation.
Here’s a snapshot of an “on-the-rails” workflow example within n8n:
The webhook from Mist triggers the automatic triage process. n8n waits for a minute and then gathers data at the site, looking for events, stats, and other metrics. It then also does a check against the Orb API to see how healthy the clients are – in other words, cross-referencing multiple sources of data to see how the AP going offline has impacted client experience. All of this is then fed to an LLM with instructions to perform the analysis.
This gives us some really good insights. What started as an AP offline alert now has root-cause analysis – highlighting that the probable cause was the administrator disabling the port in the attached switch config, repeatedly disconnecting the AP through the day to generate more alerts. Guilty as charged, but this is a great example of how a change upstream can impact the experience at the access layer. It confirms that the WAN edge looks healthy and is staying connected.
This data can be paired with other sources as well, validating that the Orb clients at the site are still happy and healthy and passing traffic even with the AP going offline.
You can see that we’ve taken one of the most simple alerts – an AP going offline – and turned it into something actionable. The initial investigation has been automated.
Now, as a second step, what if we gave the agent more control over the investigative process?
Here’s another sample architecture from n8n – and in this case we are allowing the agent to choose which tools from the MCP server to use by using the n8n AI Agent option.
This architecture takes full advantage of the MCP framework and allows this to adapt and evolve as new tools are introduced over time at the server.
Honest feedback so far? This agentic architecture can return some brilliant work but it does require some tuning of the iterations, some prompt engineering, and some careful selection of the webhook data to get the results that you want. The LLM that you select matters as well – this can burn through some tokens if you select one of the more diligent models and you may run into the rate limit if you are using a lower tier.
There are considerations that need to be made concerning data security as well. In my home environment I don’t mind that Anthropic learns about my AP going offline, but the enterprise should select the LLM carefully. In some cases it may make sense to select a self-hosted LLM like Llama or Qwen.
MCP is a new technology that is continuing to develop and evolve. There are considerations that need to be weighed and balanced – determining how many tools to expose, managing the context window, selecting the right LLM, and securing the data – but it offers a lot of promise. And now the HPE engineering team has made it even easier for you to get started with the new public beta MCP server for Mist.
Concepts of Connection 