Up until today, our users could only Authenticate our AI Advisor MCP into their own agentic solutions using an API Key and Token. A large number of users asked if we could add OAuth to the MCP Authentication methods, so today's post is about just that!

There are multiple benefits to using OAuth to Authenticate against AI Advisor's MCP:

• OAuth allows our customers to control access to the MCP directly from their IdP (provided said users have a Kentik Portal account): centralized auth management
• OAuth is useful for integrations: instead of relying on the API Token of a single user to build an integration and therefore making it brittle, OAuth elegantly solves for this use case, allowing more easy management for the business
• OAuth prevents security issues such as a User's Kentik API Token leaking or being intercepted
• More generally, OAuth has become the choice standard for MCP Authentication industry wide

Let's dive in!

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Adding AI Advisor MCP to Claude Code

Before lauching Claude Code, punch this command in your project directory: 

claude mcp add ai-advisor --transport http https://api.kentik.com/mcp 
(use api.kentik.eu if you are on an EU account)

Then launch Claude Code and fire an /mcp command, you'll see the ai-advisor MCP configured, but unauthenticated, and follow the steps - a browser tab will be invoked to login to Kentik Portal.
The series of screenshot below illustrates these steps.

When done, the /mcp command should give you a similar output with a green check indicating that AI Advisor MCP is connected!

Adding AI Advisor MCP to Claude Desktop

Use the [+] button in your prompt box in Claude Desktop and select Add Connector > Add custom connector

Use this MCP URL to configure the custom connector: https://api.kentik.com/mcp (or api.kentik.eu if you're on an EU account) and follow the step by step, which will invoke a Kentik Portal login page.

 

Follow the steps until a browser tab opens prompting you to Authenticate

You're done once the browser tab gets to this state

Adding AI Advisor MCP to Cursor

 While in Cursor, use the [+] button in your prompt box, and select MCP > Manage, and on the next screen select New MCP Server, it will open your ~/.cursor/mcp.json config file, updated it as detailed in the screenshot below using this config block. (user api.kentik.eu if you are an EU customer) and Save the mcp.json file.

{  "mcpServers": {    "Kentik AI Advisor MCP": {
      "url": "https://api.kentik.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Then click on the Authenticate option for the MCP server entry you just created

and follow the instructions in the resulting browser page until the MCP server is displayed as below

The AI team over at Kentik is very excited to see what your teams are going to build using our MCP, give us a shout if you want to demo your integrations and we'll hop on a call!