---
title: "Enable and disable tools | Grafana documentation"
description: "Control which MCP tools the Grafana MCP server exposes and use read-only mode."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Enable and disable tools

You can limit which tools the server exposes (to reduce context window use or lock down capabilities) and run the server in read-only mode.

## What you’ll achieve

You enable only the tool categories you need, or disable write operations globally with `--disable-write`.

## Before you begin

- The server installed and configured ([Set up](/docs/grafana-cloud/ai-tools/mcp-servers/oss-mcp/set-up) and [Authentication](/docs/grafana-cloud/ai-tools/mcp-servers/oss-mcp/configure/authentication)).

## Enable optional tool categories

Some tool categories are disabled by default:

- **runpanelquery** – Run dashboard panel queries.
- **examples** – Query examples for datasource types.
- **clickhouse** – ClickHouse datasource tools.
- **snowflake** – Snowflake datasource tools (including queries against `SNOWFLAKE.TELEMETRY.EVENTS` event tables).
- **cloudwatch** – CloudWatch tools.
- **elasticsearch** – Elasticsearch query tool.
- **quickwit** – Quickwit query tool.
- **influxdb** – InfluxDB query tool (Flux and InfluxQL).
- **agento11y** – Agent Observability tools for LLM conversations, generations, evaluation scores, agents, evaluators, eval rules, guards, saved conversations, collections, offline experiments, and the test suites those experiments run against.
- **assistant** – Grafana Assistant tool (`ask_assistant`); requires the Grafana Assistant plugin and is write-gated.
- **admin** – Admin tools (teams, users, roles, permissions).

`--enabled-tools` **replaces** the default list, so to add an optional category you must pass the full set. For example, to keep the defaults and also enable `runpanelquery` and `examples`:

Bash ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy

```bash
mcp-grafana --enabled-tools search,datasource,incident,prometheus,loki,alerting,dashboard,folder,oncall,asserts,sift,pyroscope,navigation,proxied,annotations,rendering,snapshot,runpanelquery,examples
```

Refer to [Command-line flags](/docs/grafana-cloud/ai-tools/mcp-servers/oss-mcp/configure/command-line-flags) for the default list.

## Disable tool categories

Use `--disable-<category>` to turn off a whole category (for example, `--disable-oncall`, `--disable-alerting`, `--disable-dashboard`). For every flag, read-only behavior, and TLS-related flags, refer to [Command-line flags](/docs/grafana-cloud/ai-tools/mcp-servers/oss-mcp/configure/command-line-flags).

For tools that come from external MCP servers through Grafana (for example from Grafana Tempo), refer to [Proxied tools](/docs/grafana-cloud/ai-tools/mcp-servers/oss-mcp/configure/proxied-tools).

## Run in read-only mode

Use `--disable-write` to disable all write operations. The server can still read dashboards, run queries, and list resources, but it cannot create or update dashboards, incidents, alert rules, annotations, snapshots, investigations, or Agent Observability evaluators, eval rules, guards, saved conversations, and collections.

## Next steps

- [Introduction](/docs/grafana-cloud/ai-tools/mcp-servers/oss-mcp/introduction) for an overview of tools and RBAC.
- [Configure authentication](/docs/grafana-cloud/ai-tools/mcp-servers/oss-mcp/configure/authentication) if you have not set credentials yet.