About Redpanda Connect MCP Server

Redpanda Connect’s MCP (Model Context Protocol) server lets you expose your data, analytics, and automations as AI-consumable tools with no custom API code. It bridges your business logic to AI agents using the open MCP standard so you can:

  • Make your data and workflows accessible to AI assistants and LLMs, safely and on your terms.

  • Accelerate automation and insight by letting AI trigger real business actions.

  • Control exposure so that only the tools you tag are visible to AI.

Use cases

Category Example prompts

Operational monitoring

  • "Check partition lag for customer-events topic."

  • "Show me the top 10 producers by message volume today."

  • "Get schema registry health status."

Data enrichment and analysis

  • "Fetch user profile data and recent orders for customer ID 12345."

  • "Get real-time stock prices for symbols in my portfolio topic."

  • "Analyze sentiment of latest product reviews."

Team productivity

  • "Deploy my microservice to the staging environment."

  • "Generate load test data for the payments service."

  • "Create a summary dashboard of this week’s incident reports."

Business intelligence

  • "What are the trending products in the last 24 hours?"

  • "Show revenue impact of the latest feature deployment."

  • "Get customer satisfaction scores from support tickets."

How it works

  1. You define a tool as a YAML configuration in Redpanda Connect, describing its inputs, outputs, and logic.

  2. The MCP server loads these tools and exposes them as HTTP endpoints, discoverable by AI agents through the MCP protocol.

  3. AI clients can list, inspect, and invoke tools to trigger real business actions or analytics with validated, structured input.

  4. All tool metadata is optimized for LLMs, so AI can understand what each tool does and how to use it.

Example: Customer analytics tool

Here’s how you might expose a customer analytics configuration as an MCP tool:

label: analyze_customer_orders
processors:
  - label: fetch_customer_data
    sql_select:
      driver: "postgres"
      dsn: "${secrets.POSTGRES_DSN}"
      table: "orders"
      where: "customer_id = ? AND created_at >= NOW() - INTERVAL '30 days'"
      args_mapping: 'root = [this.customer_id]'

  - label: calculate_metrics
    mutation: |
      root = {
        "customer_id": this.0.customer_id,
        "total_orders": this.length(),
        "total_spent": this.map_each(o -> o.total).sum(),
        "avg_order_value": this.map_each(o -> o.total).mean(),
        "last_order_date": this.map_each(o -> o.created_at).max()
      }

meta:
  mcp:
    enabled: true
    description: "Analyze a customer's order history and spending patterns over the last 30 days"
    properties:
      - name: customer_id
        type: string
        description: "Customer ID to analyze"
        required: true

This tool can be invoked by an AI assistant with prompts like "analyze the order history for customer ID 12345" without needing to know the underlying SQL or processing logic.

MCP specification support

Redpanda Connect MCP server implements the open MCP protocol for tool exposure. Only the tool concept from the MCP server specification is supported. Features such as MCP resources and prompts are not yet available.

For full details, see the official MCP server specification.

Get started

To start using the MCP server, try the quickstart.

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