Harness launches MCP tools to enhance its AI powered Chaos Engineering Capabilities
Chaos Tools on Harness MCP Server provide the opportunity to do the resilience testing using AI Agents and AI Tools with natural language prompts. Users can discover the resilience test capabilities, learn more about them and run the tests to measure the resilience data of the business critical applications or services. Chaos Tools lay the foundation for AI Powered Chaos Engineering using Harness in the Enterprise's journey towards building a strong resilience testing culture.
The practice of Chaos Engineering helps in doing resilience testing to get the measurable data for resilience of services or discover the weaknesses in them. Either way, the users will have actionable resilience data around their application services to check compliance and take proactive actions for improvements. This practice is on the rise in recent years because of heavy digital modernisation and move to cloud native systems. A successful adoption of this practice in an Enterprise requires consistent skilling of developers around chaos experimentation and resilience management, which is a challenge in itself.
The uprise in the availability of AI LLMs and associated technology advancements such as AI Agents and MCP Tools make it possible to significantly reduce the skills required to do efficient resilience testing. Users will be able to do the resilience testing successfully with very little knowledge of the vendor tools and the actual chaos experiments details. The MCP tools will do the job of converting simple user prompts in the natural language to the required product API and provide the responses, which then are interpreted nicely by the LLMs.
Harness has published it's MCP server in open source here and the documentation is found here. In this article we are announcing the MCP tools for Chaos Engineering on Harness.
Introducing Chaos MCP tools:
The initial set of chaos tools that is released will help in discovering, understanding and planning the orchestration of chaos experiments for the end users. Following are the tools
- chaos_experiments_list: List all the chaos experiments for a specific project in the account.
- chaos_experiment_describe: Get details of a specific chaos experiment.
- chaos_experiment_run: Run a specific chaos experiment.
- chaos_experiment_run_result: Get the result of a specific chaos experiment run.
These MCP tools will help the user to start and make progress on resilience testing using simple natural language prompts.
Following are some of the prompts that user can effectively use with the above tools:
- I am interested in catalog service resilience. Can you tell me what chaos experiments are available?
- Describe briefly what a particular chaos experiment does?
- Describe the resilience score calculation details of a specific chaos experiment?
- Can you run a specific experiment for me?
- Can you list the network chaos experiments and the corresponding services targeted? Tabulate if possible.
- Summarise the result of a particular chaos experiment
- Scan the experiments that were run against particular service in the last one week and summarise the resilience posture for me.
An example report would look like the following with Claude Desktop
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How to setup the Harness MCP Server?
Harness MCP server can be setup in various ways. The installation setup of MCP server is available on the documentation site. Chaos tools are part of the Harness MCP server. Follow the instructions and setup the harness-mcp-server on your AI-editors or local AI desktop application like Claude Desktop.
How do I get started with resilience testing using Harness MCP tools?
Once MCP server is setup, provide simple natural language prompts to
- First, discover the list of chaos experiment capabilities. You can even describe the resilience test scenario that you have in mind and check if your Harness project has suitable chaos experiments
- Then, understand what each experiment does in detail.
- Then, run chaos experiment of your choice and observe the resilience reports
- Generate resilience summary or brief reports or detailed reports of a particular service or a set of service
- Tabulate the results of resilience tests
Video Tutorial:
In the below video you can find details of how to configure Harness MCP server on Claude Desktop and do the resilience testing using simple natural language prompts.
Important Links:
New to Harness Chaos Engineering ? Signup here
Trying to find the documentation for Chaos Engineering ? Go here
Want to build the Harness MCP server here ? Go here
Want to know how to setup Harness MCP servers with Harness API Keys ? Go here