GridWatch MCP

An MCP interface layer for a distributed industrial asset platform.

Industrial operators — battery energy storage sites, EV charger networks, solar arrays, IoT sensor fleets — manage assets spread across geography, with health, telemetry, and alert data usually locked behind a dashboard. GridWatch exposes that operational data to AI assistants via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), so instead of clicking through charts, an engineer can ask Claude "which sites near Aachen have critical alerts?" and get a live, tool-backed answer grounded in real data.

This is a demo/portfolio build: the platform and its data are synthetic, but the MCP server, auth, geospatial queries, and data model are real and meant to mirror how an actual industrial platform would expose itself as an MCP server.

▶ Live demo: https://map-beta-plum.vercel.app ▶ MCP endpoint: https://map-beta-plum.vercel.app/api/mcp (Streamable HTTP transport, bearer-token auth)

---

Why this exists

Model Context Protocol is a young interface layer between AI assistants and software platforms — the patterns for how an industrial platform should expose itself (which operations, what auth model, what the tool surface looks like) are still forming. This project is my attempt to work through that problem concretely: design a tool surface for a real operational domain (distributed energy/industrial assets), and build it to a standard where security, latency, and scale are treated as first-class constraints, not afterthoughts.

Architecture

flowchart LR
    subgraph Client["AI Assistant"]
        C[Claude / any MCP client]
    end

    subgraph Vercel["Vercel — Fluid Compute"]
        MCP["/api/mcp\nStreamable HTTP handler"]
        Auth["Bearer-token auth\n(withMcpAuth)"]
        RateLimit["Rate limiter\n(sliding window)"]
        Dash["/ dashboard\n(Next.js RSC)"]
        MCP --> Tools
        subgraph Tools["MCP Tools"]
            T1[get_asset_status]
            T2[find_assets_near]
            T3[list_alerts]
            T4[explain_anomaly]
            T5[simulate_load]
        end
    end

    subgraph DB["Neon Postgres + PostGIS"]
        Assets[(assets)]
        Telemetry[(telemetry_readings)]
        Alerts[(alerts)]
    end

    C -- "JSON-RPC over HTTPS" --> RateLimit --> Auth --> MCP
    Dash --> Assets
    Dash --> Telemetry
    Dash --> Alerts
    Tools --> Assets
    Tools --> Telemetry
    Tools --> Alerts

Stack:

• Next.js (App Router) on Vercel Fluid Compute — one deployable for both the MCP server and the human-facing dashboard
• mcp-handler — wraps the official MCP SDK as a Web-standard Request → Response handler; handles the Streamable HTTP transport and bearer-token auth (withMcpAuth)
• Neon Postgres + PostGIS — relational data plus real geospatial queries (ST_DWithin, ST_Distance) for the find_assets_near tool
• Drizzle ORM — typed schema and queries
• Leaflet — the human-facing map view (not part of the MCP surface itself)

MCP tool surface

Tool	Purpose
get_asset_status	Current status + latest telemetry for one asset, by external ID
find_assets_near	Geospatial radius search (PostGIS ST_DWithin), optional asset-type filter
list_alerts	Fleet-wide alert feed, filterable by severity/category/resolution state
explain_anomaly	Root-cause explanation for one alert, grounded in surrounding telemetry
simulate_load	Deterministic what-if projection under a named stress scenario

Each tool call is authenticated, rate-limited, and logged — see Security, latency, scale below.

Data model

erDiagram
    assets ||--o{ telemetry_readings : has
    assets ||--o{ alerts : raises
    assets {
        int id PK
        text external_id UK
        text name
        text asset_type
        double latitude
        double longitude
        text status
    }
    telemetry_readings {
        bigint id PK
        int asset_id FK
        timestamp recorded_at
        double soc_percent
        double temperature_c
        double voltage
        double health_score
    }
    alerts {
        int id PK
        int asset_id FK
        text event_id UK
        int severity
        text category
        text message
        boolean resolved
    }

35 synthetic assets are seeded across 9 European cities (battery storage, EV chargers, solar arrays, IoT sensors), each with ~48 hours of hourly telemetry and a realistic spread of alerts. See scripts/seed.ts.

Security, latency, scale

This is the part of the ACCURE thesis prompt ("evaluated for security, latency, and scale") I tried to take seriously rather than hand-wave:

Security

• Every tool call requires a bearer token, verified via withMcpAuth before the request reaches any tool (src/app/api/mcp/route.ts)
• Input validation on every tool via Zod schemas — the MCP layer rejects malformed calls before they touch the database
• No raw SQL string interpolation — all queries go through Drizzle or Neon's parameterized tagged templates, including the PostGIS raw-SQL queries

Latency

• Neon's HTTP driver (@neondatabase/serverless) avoids TCP connection setup cost per request, which matters on serverless/Fluid Compute where instances scale to zero
• Vercel Fluid Compute reuses warm instances across requests instead of cold-starting per call, which is the main latency lever at this scale

Scale

• The rate limiter (src/lib/rate-limit.ts) is in-memory and documented as such — it's effective per-instance under Fluid Compute's instance reuse, but not distributed. The honest note in that file explains exactly what would change (swap for Upstash Redis + @upstash/ratelimit) to make it correct across many concurrent instances.
• list_alerts and find_assets_near cap result sets (50/100 rows) rather than returning unbounded fleets — a real platform integration needs pagination once fleets grow past a few thousand assets, which this intentionally punts on for demo scope.

Running locally

npm install
vercel env pull .env.local   # or copy .env.local from your own Neon/Vercel setup
npx dotenv -e .env.local -- npx tsx scripts/enable-postgis.ts
npx dotenv -e .env.local -- npx drizzle-kit generate
npx dotenv -e .env.local -- npx drizzle-kit migrate
npx dotenv -e .env.local -- npx tsx scripts/seed.ts
npx dotenv -e .env.local -- npm run dev

Set MCP_API_KEY in .env.local — it's the bearer token required to call /api/mcp. Without it set, local dev falls back to an open (logged-loudly) mode so npm run dev works out of the box; production deployments should always set it.

Connecting an MCP client

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gridwatch": {
      "url": "https://<your-deployment>.vercel.app/api/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <MCP_API_KEY>" }
    }
  }
}

What I'd build next

• Distributed rate limiting (Upstash Redis) for true multi-instance correctness
• OAuth/CIMD-based auth instead of a static bearer token, for multi-tenant access
• Pagination on list_alerts / find_assets_near
• A real anomaly-detection model behind explain_anomaly (currently rule-based heuristics per alert category) — natural extension of prior work on smart-building-fault-detection