MCP Hub Overview

MCP Hub is the management console within TIBCO Control Plane for your Model Context Protocol (MCP) infrastructure. From a single interface, you can deploy and manage MCP Gateways on your Data Planes, connect MCP servers that expose your tools, govern how those tools are used, issue access tokens for client applications, and monitor the overall activity.

MCP Hub operates within TIBCO Control Plane, while the MCP Gateways it manages run on your Data Planes. This separation allows you to operate multiple gateways across various Data Planes from a single console.

Note: MCP Hub is available in TIBCO Operated Control Plane only and it is available as Preview.

Why MCP Hub?

The TIBCO Platform MCP Hub provides several key advantages for modern enterprise AI and integration workflows by acting as a centralized orchestration middleware.

Its primary advantages include:

  • Dynamic Tool Discovery: Clients can automatically use new servers without manual intervention or code changes, allowing AI models to adapt to new capabilities dynamically.
  • Unified Observability and governance: By collecting logging, metrics, and error traces in a single location, the hub simplifies monitoring, auditing, and performance optimization. This centralized approach avoids the fragmented visibility often associated with separate logging setups for each client.
  • Security and Compliance: The hub enforces access policies, rate limits, and usage rules in one place. It also supports federated authentication control (RBAC) policies, ensuring only authorized users and agents access sensitive resources.
  • Scalability: The architecture supports horizontal scaling, enabling multiple MCP servers to run in parallel, which helps handle high volumes of client requests and simultaneous AI tasks efficiently.

Key Concepts

  • Model Context Protocol (MCP): An open protocol enabling AI applications to discover and call tools, and read prompts and resources, exposed by an MCP server.
  • MCP Gateway: An independent runtime, deployed on a Data Plane, that fronts one or more MCP servers and exposes their tools through a single, governed endpoint. MCP Hub deploys and manages each gateway.
  • MCP server: An upstream service that provides tools, prompts, and resources. You register MCP servers on a gateway to make their tools servable.
  • Tool federation: The process by which a gateway discovers an MCP server's tools and makes them callable through the gateway endpoint after you push a registered MCP server to the gateway. MCP Hub reflects these federated tools in the console.
  • Virtual Servers and Virtual Tools:
    • A Virtual Server is a client-facing MCP endpoint that exposes a curated set of tools to a client application.
    • A Virtual Tool is a tool that you create in MCP Hub from an OpenAPI or WSDL specification, or by defining a REST call. This allows you to expose an existing API without deploying a dedicated MCP server.
  • Plugins and governance: Plugins are bound to a Virtual Server or an individual tool to control how its tools, prompts, and resources can be used. Examples include rate limiting or content filtering.
  • Access tokens: Scoped bearer tokens that client applications present to authenticate their calls to a gateway.

How MCP Hub Works

A typical end-to-end workflow in MCP Hub involves the following steps:

    Procedure
  1. Deploy an MCP Gateway to a Data Plane.
  2. Register an MCP server on the gateway and push it to federate its tools.
  3. Govern the federated tools: compose Virtual servers and Virtual tools to shape what clients see, and set up plugins and governance policies to control tool usage.
  4. Issue access tokens for client applications that call the gateway.
  5. Monitor the gateway's traffic, traces, and security posture.