Managed Servers – MCP Manager

Intro

Managed servers are MCP servers that our customers host in their own infrastructure. This is quite common for servers that are either home-grown (e.g. an internal microservice or API wrapped as an an MCP) or built by a software vendor (e.g. Supabase or Zen-Memory MCP).

These servers are different in that they are not run locally by users and are not hosted in a 3rd party data center. Hosting a server has the advantage of being more in control over that data and being able to more easily monitor the data flows going in and out of that server.

How is a Managed Server different from a Remote server?

A managed server is often used to provide access to an MCP server that needs to run in a hosted environment. Sometimes though, you may want to provide different access to different users without needing to recreate the same server multiple times. For managed servers, we provide a concept of "server instances" where each instance can be connected to while making it easy to just assign a single managed server to a gateway. The key difference with server instances is that during the connection flow, a user has to select only one server instance out of many for that connection.

To provide a more concrete example, let's say you have a Memory MCP server you want to deploy to your team, but they are working on different projects. You may want to put that Memory MCP server into several gateways. Instead of having to manage M projects x N gateways, you just create a single Memory MCP server with each project being a separate server instance. These server instances can have different access for different teams or users. When a user attempts to connect to the Memory MCP via a gateway, they will select one of the projects they have access to see.

How to use MCP Manager with Managed Servers

MCP Manager makes it easy for company administrators to create and establish connections between MCPM and their hosting infrastructure. MCP Manager also makes it easy to deploy this server via our centralized registry and gateway system.

Creating a managed server instance

MCP Manager allows users with appropriate permissions to spin up a new managed server instance via an input form that requires the following fields:

Instance name
Instance command
- We support npx, uv, and uvx commands
Instance address
SSH information
MCP server domain
Arguments, env variables, and additional docker settings

This form will generate a docker run command that will stand up and run a new MCP server in your data center.

Connecting to an existing managed server

Connecting to an existing managed server is as simple as connecting to an existing remote vendor provided server. Just add in the server domain (URL) of the server and we will connect to it with the correct auth method.

Connecting an AI app or agent to a managed server

End users/consumers of managed servers will be able to connect to a managed server the same way as to any remote server. Once a managed server is assigned to a gateway, it will appear during the connection flow as a server a user can connect to. The user will have to:

be on a team that has access to the gateway that has that server assigned
have access to the correct specific server instance

Coming soon

Create new managed servers from docker commands
MCP Manager hosted servers