When you build an MCP server, you don’t control the agent calling it or the model powering it. The same server might be called by Claude Code, Cursor, or something completely custom, and it could be powered by anything from a small local LLM to a large foundation model.

In this episode of Datadog Illuminated, Reilly Wood, Staff Engineer at Datadog, explains how the team built the Datadog MCP server to work reliably across that entire wildcard space.

Every design decision flows from one constraint. You never know which agent/LLM combo will be calling the MCP server, so it has to work for all of them. That shapes everything from data formats (YAML carries the same data as JSON in far fewer tokens), to how many tools you expose, to what your error messages say.

👀 ⬇️ youtu.be/5PzqNwOTM…

Reilly Wood, a man with dark hair, glasses, and a short beard, smiles on the left side. Whitney, a woman with bright red hair, waves enthusiastically on the right. Between them is a lightboard reading "BUILDING THE DATADOG MCP SERVER" in large yellow and white pixel-style letters. "Datadog Illuminated" appears in neon-style lettering in the upper left corner. "with REILLY WOOD" is written at the bottom left.