# Govern

> Nineteen MCP tools for budgets, teams, tagging policies, smart tags and audit logs. Twelve read; five sit at tier 1 (metadata only) and two at tier 2. Roles, user management, credentials and cloud-account deletion are never exposed at any tier.

Source: https://zop.dev/integrations/mcp-server/tools/govern
Updated: 2026-08-20

---

## Common questions

### Can an assistant grant itself more access?

No. No MCP tool at any tier manages roles or permissions, creates or removes users, deletes an organisation or a cloud account, or reads credentials. Those are absent from the surface rather than gated behind a high tier.

### Why is creating a budget tier 1 rather than read-only?

A budget is a ZopNight record, so deleting one destroys no infrastructure. But budgets drive alerting, and an assistant that quietly raised a threshold would suppress the warning a human was relying on. Tier 1 is the smallest gate that makes that a deliberate choice.

### Does accepting a smart tag write a tag into my cloud account?

No. Smart tags are ZopNight's own derived attributions, used for cost reporting. Accepting one changes how spend is attributed in reports and changes nothing in AWS, Azure or GCP.

## What is deliberately not here

Start with the exclusions, because they are the point of this category. No MCP tool at any tier
can manage roles or permissions, create or remove users, delete an organisation, delete a cloud
account, or read credentials. Those are not gated behind a high tier. They are absent.

An assistant with the highest write tier enabled still cannot escalate its own access.

## The three access levels in play

- **Read (12 tools)**: `list_users`, `list_teams`, `list_roles`, `get_team`,
  `list_audit_logs`, `list_smart_tags`, `list_tagging_policies`, `list_notification_channels`,
  `get_budget_spend`, `get_cloud_account_permissions`. Note the last: it returns the per-action
  IAM probe verdicts, so an assistant can tell you *why* a schedule will fail before it does.
- **Tier 1, metadata only (5)**: `create_budget`, `update_budget`, `delete_budget`,
  `accept_smart_tag`, `revoke_smart_tag`. These change ZopNight's own records. None of them
  touches a cloud resource.
- **Tier 2, reversible (2)**: `create_tagging_policy`, `update_tagging_policy`.

## Why budgets are tier 1 and not tier 0

A budget is a ZopNight record, so deleting one destroys no infrastructure. But budgets drive
alerting, and an assistant that quietly raised a threshold would suppress the warning a human
was relying on. Tier 1 is the smallest gate that makes that a deliberate choice.

## Smart tags are proposals, not writes

`accept_smart_tag` and `revoke_smart_tag` act on ZopNight's derived tags, virtual attributions
used for cost reporting. They are never written back to your cloud provider, so accepting one
changes how spend is attributed in reports and changes nothing in AWS, Azure or GCP.