alation-ai-agent-sdk

The Alation AI Agent SDK includes an MCP integration that exposes Alation context capabilities to any MCP client. The MCP server can operate in STDIO mode for direct client connections and in HTTP mode for web applications and API integrations. This allows agents to reason over your Alation metadata and perform tasks such as catalog context searches, data product generation, custom field lookups, and more—bridging natural language queries with catalog metadata. To use the MCP server, deploy the Python-based MCP integration package (alation-ai-agent-mcp) and connect via your MCP client using either STDIO or HTTP endpoints as supported by your environment. You can selectively enable tools for your deployment to tailor what capabilities are available to your agents.

Once running, clients can query the MCP server to retrieve context about catalog assets, run searches across the data catalog using natural language, and orchestrate tool-based actions (e.g., generate data products, fetch custom field definitions, or obtain data dictionary instructions) as part of an agent workflow. The server respects authentication and authorization flows configured in your Alation instance and can be extended with environment-configured tool sets as needed by your prompts.

Prerequisites:

• Python 3.10 or higher
• Access to an Alation Data Catalog instance
• A Python environment with pip

Step 1: Install the MCP server package (alation-ai-agent-mcp) and its dependencies. This example uses the uv packaging workflow described in the README.

# Install the UV runtime (if not already installed)
pip install uv

# Install the MCP integration package
uv pip install alation-ai-agent-mcp==<desired-version>

Step 2: Prepare authentication and configuration. Ensure you have credentials for your Alation instance (service_account or bearer_token) and set any needed environment variables (e.g., ALATION_ENABLED_TOOLS).

Step 3: Run the MCP server. If using UVX as shown, start the server via:

uvx alation-ai-agent-mcp

Step 4: Connect from an MCP client. Use either STDIO mode for direct client connections or HTTP mode if your client communicates over HTTP. Refer to your MCP client documentation for configuring a remote MCP server endpoint (e.g., /ai/mcp path).

Prerequisites recap:

• Python 3.10+
• pip-based installation tooling (uv)
• Alation instance credentials
• Optional: environment variable ALATION_ENABLED_TOOLS to customize enabled tools

Tips and considerations:

• The MCP server supports enabling/disabling specific tools via the ALATION_ENABLED_TOOLS environment variable; adjust as needed for your use case.
• If you upgrade to newer SDK versions, be aware of breaking changes related to tool availability and authentication modes (e.g., guidance around service_account vs bearer_token).
• For remote MCP usage, ensure your MCP client can securely pass client_id and client_secret where required by your Alation deployment.
• If you encounter issues with tool availability, verify that your Alation instance permissions allow the requested operations and that the MCP server is correctly licensed/authorized for those capabilities.
• The MCP integration is designed to work with both STDIO and HTTP-enabled clients; choose the mode that best aligns with your application architecture.