WIP: BYOK via MCP — knowledge-type MCP servers

[onmete]

Summary

POC / draft exploring BYOK (Bring Your Own Knowledge) through MCP as an alternative to the current file-based FAISS index approach.

What this adds:

• type: knowledge on MCPServerConfig — marks an MCP server as a knowledge source
• retrieval_mode: always — forced retrieval on every query, results injected as RAG context (same pattern as current reference_content)
• retrieval_mode: on_demand — exposed as regular LLM tool, with knowledge_description augmenting the tool description so the model knows when to use it
• search_tool, max_chunks, priority — control levers for retrieval behavior
• POC setup scripts (poc/byok-mcp/) demonstrating the end-to-end flow with Qdrant + mcp-server-qdrant

Config example:

mcp_servers:
  - name: byok-docs
    url: http://qdrant-mcp:8000/mcp/
    type: knowledge
    retrieval_mode: always        # or on_demand
    search_tool: qdrant-find
    knowledge_description: "Company incident response runbooks"
    max_chunks: 5
    priority: 1

What this proves:

• Customers can bring knowledge via any MCP server — no need for our ingestion pipeline
• Zero OLS code changes needed for the basic MCP tool path; small, scoped changes for forced/on-demand retrieval modes
• The architecture supports N knowledge sources, each with its own MCP server and retrieval policy
• Same MCP server works with other AI tools (Claude, Cursor, etc.) — not locked to OLS

What this does NOT do:

• Replace the current BYOK file-based approach
• Ship production-ready code (this is a POC/discussion starter)
• Include tests (WIP)

Context

Related to the OKP integration proposal (#2914) and ongoing BYOK architecture discussions.

Test plan

• POC tested locally with Qdrant + mcp-server-qdrant + Sherlock Holmes corpus
• Unit tests for new config fields
• Unit tests for retrieve_from_knowledge_mcps
• Integration test with mock MCP server

Made with Cursor

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