Agentic Data Plane

How MCP Servers Work

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is how AI agents talk to tools. In the Agentic Data Plane, you create MCP Servers that agents can connect to. Each MCP server exposes a set of tools, resources, and prompts that an agent can discover at runtime through tools/list and invoke through structured JSON-RPC calls. Redpanda handles upstream credentials, authentication flows, observability, and aggregation, so you can focus on what your agents do, not on the plumbing.

After reading this page, you will be able to:

  • Explain how AI agents connect to tools through MCP servers in ADP

  • Distinguish managed from self-managed MCP server backends and choose the right type for your use case

  • Identify key MCP capabilities including tool discovery, authentication, and code mode

Redpanda offers two kinds of MCP server backends:

Backend When to use

Managed

Redpanda hosts the server in-process. You pick a type from the marketplace (SQL, Kafka, Slack, Jira, OpenAPI, and many more) and configure it with your credentials. No infrastructure to run.

Self-managed

You already run an MCP server somewhere and want Redpanda to proxy it for authentication, observability, aggregation, and agent access. Redpanda fronts your server with a managed URL and resolves authentication at the gateway.

The default catalog covers databases, cloud and productivity services, streaming systems, and communication tools. See Managed catalog for the full list.

When to use each

Concern Managed Self-managed

Infrastructure ownership

Redpanda hosts and operates

You host and operate

Upstream credentials

Redpanda secret store; per-type schema

Redpanda secret store or token vault; you control the upstream authentication

Custom tool logic

Limited to what the type exposes

Anything the MCP protocol supports

Startup latency

In-process; effectively zero

Network round-trip to your endpoint

Upgrade cadence

Redpanda manages

You manage

What’s in Redpanda ADP

ADP has these top-level areas:

  • LLM Providers: OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Google AI, OpenAI-compatible endpoints. See Configure your LLM provider.

  • MCP Servers: You are here. Both managed and self-managed servers live in this list.

  • OAuth Providers: Reusable upstream OAuth provider definitions used by user-delegated MCP authentication. See Configure an OAuth Provider.

  • OAuth Clients: External tools registered to request access tokens from the gateway. See Connect Remote MCP Clients.

  • Connections: Per-user OAuth connections for user-delegated MCP servers. See User-delegated OAuth.

Key capabilities

  • Tool discovery: After you create or register a server, Redpanda performs a live tools/list against it and populates the server’s detail page so you can see which tools are visible to agents.

  • Service-account and user-delegated authentication: Pick a single shared upstream identity for all callers, or have each end-user authenticate against the upstream system with their own credentials.

  • Code mode: For a server with a large tool catalog, turn on code mode to expose just two tools, search and execute, so an agent can find tools by regex and run them through a JavaScript sandbox instead of loading every tool definition into its context. See Code Mode.

  • Inspector: Test each tool, resource, and prompt directly from ADP before pointing an agent at the server. See Test a server’s tools.

Next steps