Connectors and MCP Catalog¶
Target architecture — not the current operating contract
This page includes the broader Connector lifecycle. For implemented administration and API behavior, see Connector administration and the MCP Gateway.
Product abstraction¶
MCP is Mission Control's only enterprise integration protocol. The product registers MCP Servers, discovers their typed tools, and represents each individual tool internally as a Connector.
The server is the transport and authentication boundary. The Connector is the governable capability boundary. One MCP Server can expose Data, Decision, and Action tools; therefore classification, grants, ownership, versioning, risk, certification, health, usage, evidence, and lifecycle are managed per tool.
Models are not Connectors. Providers, model deployments, routing, and inference stay in Model Management and the separate Model Gateway.
Tool classifications¶
Every Connector has exactly one primary class:
| Class | Meaning | Baseline control posture |
|---|---|---|
| Data | Reads, searches, lists, fetches, or supplies information without changing enterprise state | Caller and source access, purpose, data class, lineage, freshness, and citation |
| Decision | Evaluates, scores, recommends, validates, or applies a business rule without changing enterprise state | Input and output references, decision version, confidence or validation, reproducibility, and outcome linkage |
| Action | Changes enterprise state, emits an externally meaningful event, or initiates side-effecting work | Strong authorization, scope, risk and value thresholds, stable idempotency, approval, operating window, and recovery or compensation |
Data and Decision tools are side-effect-free from the caller's perspective. Any meaningful external effect makes the tool an Action Connector. A tool is not downgraded because its side effect is asynchronous, indirect, low value, or described as a notification.
Composite behavior is a versioned Workflow containing several narrowly classified Connectors. It is not represented as one tool with a weakened or ambiguous class.
Components¶
| Component | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| MCP Server Registry | Record server identity, endpoint, transport, owners, environments, health, and customer-secret reference |
| Tool Discovery | Import tool names, descriptions, typed argument and result schemas, and advertised version metadata |
| Connector Catalog | Present each imported tool as a separately addressable and governed product resource |
| Classification Manager | Assign Data, Decision, or Action and the corresponding baseline control profile |
| Risk and Ownership | Capture risk tier, data class, business owner, technical owner, operational contacts, and business criticality |
| Capability Grants | Control which Agents, Workflows, AI Applications, services, and environments may request the Connector |
| Certification Workspace | Test connectivity, schemas, representative results, policy fixtures, idempotency, timeouts, retries, and failure behavior |
| Version Monitor | Detect tool additions, removals, schema changes, server changes, and compatibility impact |
| Health and Usage | Show availability, latency, failures, consumers, execution volume, cost, exceptions, and incidents |
Credentials remain in the customer secret manager. Mission Control stores a reference and the Connector Gateway brokers scoped access at invocation time.
Registration and promotion¶
Registration follows a controlled sequence:
- Register the MCP Server, owners, environments, endpoint, transport, network path, and secret reference.
- Discover tools and import their typed schemas without granting consumer access.
- Create one candidate Connector resource and version for each tool.
- Assign exactly one class, owners, data class, risk tier, operational contacts, and baseline control profile.
- Define capability grants, policy bindings, environment restrictions, and Action-specific idempotency and compensation expectations.
- Certify connectivity, schema validation, representative responses, failure behavior, policy fixtures, retries, and version compatibility.
- Review and promote an immutable Connector version into an environment.
- Monitor health, schema drift, usage, consumers, cost, failures, and incidents.
No Connector reaches production without a class, business and technical owner, immutable version, risk posture, environment approval, policy binding, and successful certification.
Newly discovered or breaking versions are quarantined. They cannot replace an active version until review and promotion. Removed server support is surfaced as a controlled degradation affecting every pinned consumer.
Connections¶
| Connection | Contract |
|---|---|
| Control Kernel | Server and Connector identity, owners, lifecycle, grants, policy bindings, evidence, evaluation, and incidents |
| Connector Gateway | Exclusive transport, authentication, version resolution, schema validation, policy, approval, invocation, result normalization, and evidence path |
| Agent Studio | Agents request specific Connector capabilities; ownership or prompt text never grants access implicitly |
| Automations | Steps bind a Connector class and immutable version range to typed input, output, timeout, retry, idempotency, and failure behavior |
| Retrieval | Sources use only Data Connectors that support approved discovery, search, fetch, or list operations |
| AI Applications | Client experiences invoke registered Agents or Workflows; they do not call Connectors directly from the browser |
| Operations and Assurance | Shows health, consumers, invocations, decisions, approvals, outcomes, version drift, exceptions, and incidents |
The gateway contract defines the complete invocation sequence. The shared resource model defines immutable identity and evidence fields.
Non-goals¶
The Connector Catalog is not:
- A catalog of arbitrary proprietary integration protocols.
- A model-provider or inference catalog.
- A per-server classification that hides different tool effects.
- A general iPaaS, ETL, or Workflow product.
- A secret store or a direct browser integration surface.
- A way to permit unclassified or uncertified production tools.
Current governance mapping¶
The current source release uses Organizations, Teams, real user/service-account virtual keys and separate human management roles. Agent is managed application content; deployments own secretless execution access and publisher funding. Observe uses Requests, Traces, Sessions and Usage with separate metadata/content/export permissions. Historical identity terms in this target proposal are not the operating contract. See Current release.