Curated tools and API discovery

The CV-CUE REST API has 613 operations across 24 modules. Exposing one MCP tool per operation would swamp the model: the tool list alone would fill much of the context window, and no model can pick reliably from hundreds of similar names.

CV-CUE MCP splits the work in two.

Curated tools for everyday questions

30 tools cover what people ask most: APs, clients, SSIDs, locations, events, WIPS and troubleshooting. They do more than pass through one API call:

• Rollups. cvcue_ap_health_summary pages through every AP and returns counts by model, firmware and status, plus the offline and problem APs, instead of hundreds of raw records.
• One-shot troubleshooting. cvcue_troubleshoot_client combines the client record, association history, connection logs, failure events and CV-CUE’s inferences in one call.
• Cleaned-up output. Location IDs are flattened from {"type":"locallocationid","id":5} to 5, timestamps become ISO-8601, and empty fields are dropped.
• Safety. Write tools check that writes are enabled, go through confirm before write when it’s on, and destructive ones also require confirm=true.

Four discovery tools for everything else

For device templates, policies, RF settings, reports, packet captures and the rest, Claude uses the API the way you would with the docs open:

Step	Tool	What it does
1	cvcue_api_modules	Lists the 24 modules with operation counts
2	cvcue_api_search	Finds endpoints by keyword, optionally by module and HTTP method
3	cvcue_api_schema	Shows an endpoint’s parameters, request body and response schema
4	cvcue_api_execute	Calls the endpoint with your connection

Steps 1–3 read a copy of Arista’s published OpenAPI spec bundled with the server, so they’re instant and don’t touch your CV-CUE account. Only step 4 calls the API.

Caveats and notes

The spec doesn’t always match how the live API behaves. cvcue_api_schema therefore returns two extra lists with every endpoint:

• caveats: quirks verified against a live CV-CUE server and shipped with CV-CUE MCP. For example, time parameters are epoch milliseconds even where the spec says microseconds; device templates need modelspecific=false to stay a manageable size; and startindex is a record offset, not a page number.
• your_notes: quirks Claude found and saved for your account with cvcue_save_endpoint_note. They’re private to you, come back on every later lookup of that endpoint, and can be removed with cvcue_delete_endpoint_note.

Claude is told to save only facts it proved against the live API, never guesses, secrets or customer data. Notes are limited to 500 characters, 10 per endpoint and 300 per account. Notes need an account; with a raw API key there’s nowhere to keep them. On a local server they’re kept in ~/.cvcue-mcp/notes.json.

Guard rails on cvcue_api_execute

• Anything other than GET is refused unless writes are enabled for the connection, and is previewed for your OK first when confirm before write is on.
• Write bodies that contain the ***REDACTED*** placeholder are refused, so a read-modify-write can’t overwrite a real passphrase with the mask.
• Responses over 100,000 characters are refused with a preview of their shape and tips to narrow the request (fields=[…], paging, locationid, modelspecific=false).

The response envelope

Every tool returns the same shape, so Claude handles errors the same way everywhere:

{ "ok": true, "data": { … }, "message": "" }
{ "ok": false, "data": null, "message": "No managed AP matches 'lobby-3'", "status": 0 }