EPICS Server

ARGUS is an MCP server that gives an AI assistant a unified operational interface to an accelerator control room — not just EPICS. A single tool call like diagnose_device("QF12") transparently pulls together live PV values, archived trends, Kubernetes pod status, ArgoCD deployment state, recent logbook entries, and documentation, and returns one structured report. The LLM never needs to know (or ask) which backend answered.

ARGUS started as a fork of INFN's epics-mcp-server (a 3-tool EPICS-only proof of concept) and has been rebuilt into a modular provider → service → tool architecture. See docs/architecture.md for the full picture.

Why not just expose EPICS functions as tools?

Because a control room isn't just PVs. A device like quadrupole QF12 is a PV group, an IOC, a Kubernetes pod, a GitOps deployment, a maintenance history, and a stack of documentation — and answering "what's wrong with QF12?" means correlating all of that. ARGUS exposes ~18 high-level, intent-shaped tools instead of hundreds of thin per-backend wrappers; each tool decides internally which of EPICS, the Archiver Appliance, ChannelFinder, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Elasticsearch, the electronic logbook, or local documentation to query (in parallel, with per-backend timeouts and graceful degradation).

Quickstart

python3.12 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env   # at minimum, set EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST
.venv/bin/python -m argus --transport stdio

Every provider besides EPICS is entirely optional — the server boots fine with just EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST set; unconfigured providers report themselves as unconfigured rather than erroring, and diagnose_device() still returns a graceful partial report. See .env.example for every provider's config, and docs/providers.md for what each one talks to.

Serve over SSE instead of stdio:

.venv/bin/python -m argus --transport sse --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000

Backward compatibility

The original 3 tools still exist, unchanged, so existing clients (including the example scripts under test/) work with zero changes:

• get_pv_value(pv_name) → {"status": "success", "value": ...}
• set_pv_value(pv_name, pv_value) → {"status": "success", "message": ...}
• get_pv_info(pv_name) → {"status": "success", "info": {...}}

get_pv/set_pv are the new, richer equivalents (include timestamp and alarm severity); the legacy names are thin aliases with byte-identical input schemas, enforced by tests/tools/test_pv_tools_backward_compat.py.

Tools

Tool	What it does
get_pv / set_pv / get_pv_info	Read/write/inspect a single PV
get_pv_value / set_pv_value	Legacy aliases of get_pv/set_pv
search_pvs	Search PVs/channels by name, tag, or property (ChannelFinder)
get_device	Full device metadata: PVs, IOC, pod, namespace, rack, owner, docs
device_status	Quick health snapshot: live PVs + pod status
diagnose_device	Full cross-system diagnostic report, one call
beamline_status	Aggregate status across a group of devices
get_history	Historical trend data for a PV (Archiver Appliance)
get_alarm_history	Recent alarm-tagged logbook entries for a device
get_logs	Search historical application/IOC logs (Elasticsearch)
list_iocs	List IOCs and their Kubernetes pod status
restart_ioc	Restart an IOC's pod
machine_summary	Machine-wide IOC health + recent alarm counts
execute_procedure	Run a named, pre-approved operational procedure (scaffolded; no procedures ship yet — see ADR context)
search_documentation	Search technical documentation (local TF-IDF by default, or RAGFLOW — see providers.md)
list_beamline_devices	Structured device inventory (IOCs, zones, devgroup/devfunc) parsed from a beamline's deploy YAML
get_config_history	Read a beamline config file's current content, git history, or a commit's diff (GitHub/GitLab)
search_knowledge_base	Search issues/tickets across configured repos for past problems and resolutions (GitHub/GitLab)

Development

.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
.venv/bin/pytest

Tests never require a running EPICS/Kubernetes/ArgoCD/etc. instance — every backend is mocked. See docs/developer-guide.md for how to add a new provider or tool, and docs/class-diagram.md for the object model.

EPICS Channel Access, for local testing

softIoc -d ~/EPICS/DB/test.db
caget temperature:water
caput temperature:water 100

then point ARGUS at it with EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST=127.0.0.1 in .env.

Deploying

• Docker: docker build -t argus . — runs python -m argus --transport stdio by default; override the command for SSE.
• Smithery: smithery.yaml launches python -m argus --transport stdio.