Connector Gateway
The Connector Gateway is a component of Stacklok Enterprise.
The Connector Gateway provides an identity-aware endpoint for MCP tool calls. It evaluates each connector's policy to expose the connectors available to each caller and brokers connector credentials on their behalf.
It is the counterpart to the AI Gateway. The AI Gateway governs the models your agents can call; the Connector Gateway governs the tools they can use.
Connector Gateway and vMCP
Use the Connector Gateway to provide people with a group-scoped set of
connectors that administrators manage in the console. Use a
Virtual MCP Server (vMCP) for applications
and agents with a predefined toolset. A vMCP supports static backend selection,
tool filtering and renaming, multiple authentication methods, and
ToolhiveAuthorizationPolicy resources.
You can run the Connector Gateway and multiple vMCP instances in the same cluster.
What you administer here
- Register MCP servers as connectors.
- Configure how the gateway authenticates to each connector's backend.
- Grant connector access to directory groups or through Cedar policies.
- Let users connect to the connectors they're granted and choose their tools.
- Review tool calls by connector and tool, and export telemetry and audit events.
Before you start
Deploy and configure the Connector Gateway before administering connectors. See Configure the Connector Gateway. To try the gateway end to end first, follow the Connector Gateway quickstart.
Contents
Connector Gateway
Govern which MCP servers your organization exposes, who can use them, and how their tools are used.
Quickstart
Register a remote MCP server as a connector, grant it to a group, call its tools from Claude Code, and see the call in Tool Usage.
Connectors
Register connectors from your registry, cluster, or by hand, and configure their transport and private network access.
Connector authentication
Choose how the Connector Gateway authenticates to each connector's backend, from static secrets to per-user OAuth and token exchange flows.
Connector access
Grant directory groups access to a connector and revoke it, so each user sees only the connectors their groups allow.
Support user access
Understand the connection states, tool choices, and sign-in steps users see, and what to check when a user can't reach a connector's tools.
Tool usage
Review Connector Gateway tool calls by time range, connector, and tool, and turn on tool call recording to populate the screen.
Telemetry
Export Connector Gateway traces, metrics, and logs to an OpenTelemetry collector, or scrape Prometheus metrics from a dedicated listener.
Audit logs
Record a structured audit event for every MCP request through the Connector Gateway, then ship the events to Splunk, Elastic, or Loki.