Kong AI assistant (KAi)

Kong’s AI assistant, KAi, can detect issues, suggest fixes, and accelerate your workflows all without leaving the Konnect UI. KAi is enabled by default for Konnect Plus and trial accounts. KAi is always disabled by default for Enterprise accounts. Enterprise accounts can enable KAi by contacting their Kong account manager or enabling it in Konnect Labs.

KAi can help you do the following:

• Find information on Konnect: Ask questions about Konnect features, settings, and configurations.
• Explore gateway entities: View and explore API gateway entities: Services, Routes, plugins, and more.
• Debug and analyze API traffic: Get real-time insights and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks and issues.

Try KAi in Konnect →

KAi is made up of a series of components running inside Konnect. The agent can perform smart orchestration and analysis of Konnect data and entities. You can interact with the agent in the following ways:

• Use the chat in the Konnect UI by clicking Ask KAi in the top right.
• Click Analyze with KAi on an individual trace in the Debugger to send the trace summary, spans, and logs directly to KAi.

The KAi agent uses backend LLMs for reasoning and natural language tasks. It also uses a Konnect MCP server to provide information about Konnect and the user’s entities and data. Because the MCP server is authenticated via the logged-in user’s session, it only has access to data and resources that the user has permission to access.

KAi also has access to Kong’s documentation and support knowledge base, so it can provide guidance on configuration, architecture, and troubleshooting.

Like other AI chatbots, KAi uses sessions. KAi can remember context within a session, but doesn’t share context between sessions. You can have a maximum of three active sessions with KAi.

 
flowchart LR
  subgraph backends["Backends & data sources"]
    direction LR
    LLM["LLM backend"]
    MCP["Konnect MCP Server"]
    KB["Kong Docs & support 
knowledge base"]
  end

  subgraph kai["KAi Agent"]
    direction LR
    UI["Konnect UI chat"]
  end

  User(("User"))

  User --> kai
  kai --> backends
  click MCP "/konnect-platform/konnect-mcp/"

  

To start a chat with KAi, click Ask KAi in the top right of the Konnect UI.

KAi is context-sensitive, so if you navigate to a control plane or Gateway Service, KAi uses that entity as context when answering questions. We recommend adding context, like your control plane, to get the best possible answers from KAi.

The token context limit for a single chat displays in the bottom right of the chat window, below the submit button.

You can create a new session from the Active sessions dropdown menu by selecting “New Chat”. To delete a session, click the action menu icon next to the session and click Delete.

The same Konnect MCP Server that powers KAi is available for use with external AI assistants and IDE copilots. This lets you interact with your Konnect resources directly from your development environment.

With the MCP server, you can:

• Query, create, modify, and delete Konnect entities and configurations
• Create and analyze debug sessions for performance issues
• Search Kong documentation
• Analyze API traffic

Admins can disable write tools in KAi and restrict users to read-only queries and docs search. Write tool usage is enabled by default to allow the broadest range of use cases, but can be disabled in the Konnect AI Settings page.

Learn how to configure the MCP server

Debugging & performance

• Why is my /api/checkout endpoint slow? Create a debugging session, focusing on high-latency requests, and summarize where time is being spent.
• Help me diagnose intermittent 502s on my ROUTE_NAME Route.
• What is the plugin execution order for my ROUTE_NAME Route?
• Why are Consumers in CONSUMER_GROUP getting 401s? Walk me through likely causes and how to verify them in Konnect.

Configuration

• What plugins affect the ROUTE_NAME Route? List them in order and explain what each one does.
• Build me a decK file showing how to create a Service, Route, and sensible default set of plugins.
• Show me all rate limiting plugins across production control planes.
• List all Routes associated with the SERVICE_NAME Gateway Service and tell me which auth and security plugins apply to each.
• How do I create a new CP with Terraform?

Security & governance checks

• Audit my CONTROL_PLANE control plane for common security misconfigurations (for example: missing auth, weak TLS, or overly broad CORS). Suggest prioritized fixes.
• Check if any Routes in my CONTROL_PLANE control plane expose endpoints without authentication, and list them.
• Suggest a safe baseline policy set for a public API (rate limiting, authentication, and logging) and show how to apply it to the SERVICE_NAME Gateway Service.

Questions about Konnect

• How do I set up the plugin PLUGIN_NAME in Konnect for a particular use case? Give me the exact steps and the limitations.
• Explain the difference between a Gateway Service and a Route in Konnect, with an example from my current control plane.
• What’s the recommended way to troubleshoot upstream timed out errors in Kong Gateway?
• Search the Kong docs for best practices on rate limiting and summarize the key steps for my setup.