Kong Konnect MCP Server

The Kong Konnect MCP Server enables developers to manage API infrastructure and debug performance issues directly from their development environment. You can also plug in Kong Konnect MCP Server to your AI agents to automate tasks like configuration management and performance troubleshooting.

The same tools available in Kong Konnect MCP Server power KAi (Kong’s AI assistant), an in-product AI assistant for Kong Konnect.

Get started with Kong Konnect MCP →

Use cases

The Kong Konnect MCP Server enables many workflows for managing and debugging your API infrastructure:

• Kong Konnect entity management: Query control planes, services, routes, consumers, consumer groups, plugins, and vaults.
• API debugging: Create debug sessions with active tracing to investigate performance issues and identify bottlenecks.
• Analytics and monitoring: Query API request data with filters for time range, status codes, consumers, services, and routes.
• Kong documentation search: Search Kong’s documentation for configuration guidance and troubleshooting steps.

When should I use an MCP Server?

Use the Kong Konnect MCP Server when:

• You want to manage Konnect resources from your IDE or terminal
• You need to debug API performance issues with active tracing
• You prefer working with AI assistants for infrastructure tasks
• You need to query analytics and traffic patterns programmatically

Kong Konnect MCP Server provides programmatic access to your Konnect resources through the Model Context Protocol. The server exposes specialized tools that AI assistants can use to query Kong Gateway entities, analyze traffic, debug performance issues, and search documentation.

You can connect to the MCP server from:

• IDEs with MCP client support (VS Code, Cursor, IntelliJ)
• AI assistants like Claude and GitHub Copilot
• Claude Code CLI for terminal-based workflows
• Any MCP-compatible client application

The server connects to Konnect backend services to retrieve Kong Gateway configuration, analytics data, active tracing sessions, and Kong’s documentation. This allows AI assistants to provide contextual assistance for debugging, configuration, and operational tasks.

Personal Access Token

The MCP server can authenticate using your Personal Access Token (PAT), which means it only accesses resources you have permission to view. Create a token by opening the Kong Konnect tokens page and selecting Generate Token. All queries respect your organization’s role-based access controls and regional data boundaries.

System Account Access Token

For automated workflows, you can also use a System Account Access Token. SPATs are tied to specific service accounts with defined permissions, allowing secure machine-to-machine authentication without user intervention.

The MCP server is deployed regionally. Connect to the server in the same region where your Konnect resources are deployed.

Default endpoint

The regional endpoint defaults to US region.

Organizations using multiple Kong Konnect regions require separate MCP server connections for each region. Resources cannot be accessed across regions from a single connection.

Organization settings

Kong Konnect MCP Server access is enabled by default. Organization administrators can disable it from the Organization Settings.

Available tools

The Kong Konnect MCP Server exposes a full suite of tools covering the entire GA Kong Konnect product. It provides three core tools that work together to let your AI assistant discover, understand, and interact with Kong Konnect APIs:

• search — finds relevant API operations based on a description of what you want to do (e.g. "list all services in a control plane").
• get_schema — retrieves the full/partial (as required) schema for a specific operation, so the AI knows exactly what parameters and request body fields are required.
• execute — calls the API operation with the appropriate inputs, based on what get_schema returned.

Rather than calling a fixed set of individual tools, your AI assistant uses this discover-then-execute pattern to perform complex, multi-step tasks across Kong Konnect. This means the AI reasons over the available operations at runtime and constructs the correct API calls, rather than relying on hardcoded tool definitions for every action.

Usage with skills and plugins

The Kong Konnect MCP Server can be installed and used via Plugins and Skills for many existing tools. All the plugins and skills listed on the Kong Skills Hub are MCP-aware and when installed can use the MCP server to accomplish many tasks more effectively across many Kong Konnect products.

The following are the latest changes in Kong Konnect MCP Server:

• Standalone MCP Code Mode released GA (May 18, 2026)

• Public Beta release (December 19, 2025)

For a complete changelog of all Kong Konnect MCP Server releases, see the Kong Konnect MCP Server changelog.