Installing and Using the AutotaskMCP Server

Hey everyone, Chris Timm here from Sondela Consulting. In this video, I'm going to talk about the Autotask MCP server that I recently developed. So, let's go and take a look firstly at what is an MCP server. So, looking it up on Google and getting the Google response of what an MCP server is. Uh it it's called the model context protocol.

Uh and it's designed really to facilitate communication between AI applications and the data they require. Really what this means in a nutshell is that you can use an MCP server with an AI tool like Claude or or um CH GPT or one of those kind of tools. Um and it allows you to use plain English commands um to to do things like creating tickets and updating time and all of that kind of stuff without you having to necessarily know what all of the API endpoints are or even how to use APIs. So, what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to show you how to go ahead and install this and how to get this working. And then we're going to do a couple of tests um and and see how this fares.

So, the very first thing you want to do is you want to come to the GitHub, my GitHub repository um and that's up here. I will put a link to this in the description below. Um and the couple of things you really need to bear in mind. Firstly, the application is developed in in Python. So, you do need to have Python installed.

This video isn't going to go through how to install Python. It is going to um however go through uh you know how you run it and and and all of that kind of stuff. So the very first thing you need to do once you've installed Python is you need to then go ahead and install these dependencies. Once the dependencies are done, you can simply copy this test auto task credentials. And if we come into here and run this command, ah, it's not going to work.

Um, because I've got Python 3. But before we do anything, um, what you want to do to get these files down is you want to click on code, go to download zip. This will simply download the zip file for you. And then what you want to do from here is if you just open up the zip file, you have a whole bunch of files in here. You can just copy these to any directory you like.

I just so happen to have copied mine into a folder called autotaskmcp. You do not have to follow that. You can put it pretty much wherever you want. What you can then do from here um and in my case I have to just change something ever so slightly cuz I'm using Python 3. So I'm going to change this to say Python 3.

And you can see if this works, if this starts to actually give you the auto task username and password, then we know that the Python is is actually working and you know that all the dependencies have been installed correctly. So at this point, what we want to do now is I'm just going to move this away a little bit um and get rid of all of these cuz we no longer need these. What I'm going to do here is um if I go into auto task and let's actually uh go and have a look at how we would create a username. Uh so we go into account settings and users. Click on resources and users.

Resources and users. And then the very first thing you want to do is click this dropown. Go into new API user. And you can call this something like you know ATMCP whatever you want to call it blah blah blah. get your generate key, generate secret and the most important thing here is you need to have these details. So once you have this information entered into the system, you will be presented with um with that file where you need to go and enter all of this information.

So first things first, um I already have copied those and don't worry, this is just a demo account. So feel free to uh to copy these. They will be deleted at the end of this video. Um and uh so yeah, so no point no point trying to nick them. Uh what we can do here is if we go into the uh username, you want to stick the username in here.

Now bearing in mind this is your API username, not the username that you use to log into the computer or log into auto task with. And we're going to copy the secret. In my case, I just need to make sure I'm not including those quotes, which I'm not. Great. And then the integration code is the last thing that we need.

So if we copy our integration code and what we can do from here um now as soon as you know that this has worked you will actually see um just up here it will actually tell you that it's worked. Oh sorry before we know it's worked um we need to enter in some details here around um what server we are connecting to. So how do we know what this information is? So from here we can see that this is telling us which URL to use in here. The URL that we need to use is based upon what information we have up here.

So in this case I'm on WW2. So when you need to type in and and give this test application the uh username and password uh sorry the um the URL you want to make sure that you select the one that says web services 2. If you're on 16 it's going to be web services 16. If you're on 11 it's going to be 11. The rest of it is all exactly the same.

It's just that number that changes. So if you come into here and click paste, what this does is this goes ahead and it does a test. Once the test is done, so you can see it's tested the credentials. It's then giving you this configuration file here. And this is the file that we need to use to go into um uh you know that we need to use to log into into Claude.

Really important. So a couple of things you can do. You can either save this configuration file. If you say yes, then oops. Yeah, basically if you say yes, um you can then do a few things.

You can restart Claude desktop. You can start chatting with Claude. You can do a whole bunch of other bits and pieces. I'm going to ignore this for now. Um, what we need to do though is once you've copied this file, either by saving it and then copying the file into the configuration path or just copying this, which to be honest is the quickest and easiest way to do it.

Simply copy that. What we do is you can see here we have this in um I have this in my notepad. Now, one thing to note at this point is the um command here that use there's two things here. this um args which should be in that file that you've just copied. You need to make sure that it is actually pointing to the correct place for that Python file. You also need to make sure that this is the correct location where it knows how to access Python in order to make these calls.

Um the slashes here again are forward slashes. Even if you are using Windows, these are forward slashes that you need. So it's really important to make sure that you get this right. And then this is what we're going to call our MCP server. So really straightforward information at this point.

Now a couple of things to to note. This works off um a desktop application. So we are installing this MCP server directly on our own computer. Um so you need to have the desktop version of Claude uh in order for this to work. So I have the desktop version here.

If I open up the desktop version, couple of things I need to do once you are are in and you can start typing stuff. If you click this little button here, which is the search and tools, and you can see mine's already highlighted, but if you click on manage connectors, and you go to developer, and then from here, if you clicked edit config, it will take you directly to where that config file is. What you want to do is you just want to open this. So, in my case, we'll open this with something like Sublime. And you just need to make sure that you copy that information that you had on that uh that file that you copied.

You need to make sure that it goes here into that file. Make sure you save that file. And then it's really important at this point to uh to make sure that claude is fully closed down. So don't just exit from it out of your your toolbar. you can in Mac because it closes it down fully when you do that. In Windows, it still leaves bits and pieces lying around.

So, you may want to go and actually use um the task manager to completely make sure that that application is completely removed. Once you've got that, if you then simply click back into claw desktop, if you have no errors, then everything should be good. And if you click the little tools but uh button again, you will see that we've got this autotask um MCP server is turned on and is good to go and and ready to go. Cool. So now we can start interacting with auto task.

So let's have a look at how we would do this. So the very first thing you can do here is you can say you know create a ticket for carry on properties with the subject of help me now and the description of I need help. And I'm actually going to spell this wrong on purpose. And what this will do is it'll go away and it will now talk to that MCP server and it'll say, "Hey, I'm going to go create this ticket." So it says, "However, I found a small typo in the description. Do you want me to change this?" Yes.

Um, now one of the things it does is it needs your permission to go ahead and do all of these things. So um you can do this allow always or allow once. So I'm just going to say allow once. So this is now going to go find a company. It's now found the company called caron properties.

Um it's got the company ID and it's now going to go and create the ticket against that company. So if I click on allow once, what we will see is this says it's now created the ticket. And we can actually go and see this by simply going into our dashboard and looking at all tickets created today. And we can see we've got this help me now. And here is our ticket that has just been created.

And we know that it's been created by that API account because we have um the information here on who it was created by. So let's go see what else we can do. Well, maybe what we want to do, it's all very well and good. We now have this ticket. Oh, and by the way, you can see it's changed it back to the word help.

So, it's actually um did correct it for us. What we can do is to say um can you please assign assign this to Christ and add 1 hour of time starting now and ending in an hour with the status of in progress. Now, sometimes this process may actually fail. Um, it doesn't always pick it up the first time. You might need to train it a little bit.

Um, but I think I've got the model pretty much working. So, what it's now going to go and do is it says, "Right, I'll break this down." So, it says, "Yep, I know who he is." So, it's found the resource. Um, and then it says it's going to try and search on the name. And each time you can see that it's basically asking you to um to verify. So it says now I'll update.

So it's found all of that information. It's now going to update everything and it's going to use the the RO ID of that and away it goes. It's going to say summary notes, initial investigation, and ticket assessment. Because I didn't tell it what to put in there. It's just going to make the assumption of what it needs to put in the summary notes.

So, we're going to go allow once and it also is going to modify the start and stop time. So, we can go allowance. Bang. And it's created the time entry and assigned it to Chris Timm. So, should we have a look?

If we come back into the ticket and we refresh it, what we can see is this ticket has now changed the status to in progress. We can see it's assigned it to Chris Timm. Uh wherever the assignment is gone on this one. Um and well, Chris Timm added that uh that time. And then you can see it's added it for an hour starting from today with the initial investigation.

And that is pretty much it. There's a bunch of other things that we can do with this. You know, you might want to say, um, give me a list of all tickets for Caron Properties. And this can go ahead and give you a list of all of the tickets for this particular um for this particular company. So here you'll see there we go.

It's going to go and find them. If we say allow once, you can do this kind of stuff, right? So you can really start to to hone this down and find out any tickets or customers or you know tickets for this company. And there it is. It says there's total of 28 tickets.

And it's giving you the information about those particular tickets. Um and it says most tickets are in the new status or in the in progress status. So it's now saying what do you want me to do? So now you can tell it to for example list all new tickets only. And this should go ahead and find all the new tickets.

Um, and you can see now it's listing all of those with a status of one and it's found these uh these tickets which it's now listing. So you can see there's a whole bunch of stuff we can do on here. Another useful one might be um you know something like give me a list of all customers in auto task. give me a list of all my customers maybe. And what this will do is it'll go ahead and it'll give you a list of all of your customers, that little list in um in order task. So you can see doing this once it decides it's going to do this list.

It this does take a little bit of time. There you go. So allow once again. And now it's going to go and search all of the companies in order task. And hopefully with a bit of luck, it should come back without failing it should.

There you go. So it's now said I'll highlight the key customers. And there they all are. So it's picked all of those customers up. Um would you like me about any of these other particular companies?

Um but you can just keep going. You can keep chatting with it and doing a bunch of stuff. But as you can see, the beauty of using an MCP server is you're not having to now know anything about the API details in um in in Autoaski not knowing how to uh you don't have to know how to do any of these things. Um you know, know how to connect to this data because the MCP server is doing that for you. Um and one of the really great things is now you can start to use these MCP servers in um in other tools as well.

And I'll be doing a series of videos around um N8N and how to connect with N8N and you can then use that to kind of leverage the MCP server to go and do a bunch of stuff in um in Autoask. So I hope that was helpful. Um let me know if there's any questions. Feel free to comment below. I will put links to everything I've talked about in the description below.

I really appreciate your uh your time and thank you so much for watching and I will look forward to seeing you on the next video.