Power Azure SRE Agent with the tools it needs

What is the Azure SRE Agent

Azure SRE Agent is an AI-powered service designed to reduce operational toil. Teams can use it to:

• Investigate incidents and identify probable causes.
• Automate health checks, compliance reviews, and other scheduled work.
• Answer questions such as “What changed before this service became degraded?”
• Propose remediations while allowing teams to require human approval.

An effective investigation rarely depends on one source of information. An alert might originate in Azure Monitor, while deployment history lives in source control, telemetry stored in another observability platform, and incident records in a service-management tool. Without access to those systems, you must retrieve and transfer the information manually, adding context switching and slowing diagnosis.

MCP servers can give SRE Agent tools to query telemetry, inspect deployments, retrieve database records, look up incidents, etc. SRE Agent provides native connection for some servers such as GitHub, Datadog, New Relic, and Splunk. Connector Namespace makes it easier to host additional remote MCP servers you want the agent to use.

Removing remote MCP server hosting burden

Connecting SRE Agent to an existing remote endpoint is straightforward. Hosting that endpoint yourself is not.

You must deploy the server, provide secure HTTPS infrastructure, configure authentication, manage downstream credentials, scale the runtime, monitor its health, recover failed instances, and maintain it over time. These responsibilities are necessary, but the value is in the server’s tools not in operating another service.

Azure Connector Namespace is a fully managed service for hosting connectors and MCP servers. You select the server you need and let the namespace handles the operational and maintenance tasks. The offering is currently in preview. See documentation for supported regions and other preview considerations.

You’ll find a wide variety of servers in the Connector Namespace’s catalog. Some examples of useful servers for the SRE agent include:

• Database servers such as Azure SQL and Azure Cosmos DB
• Source control and CI/CD servers like GitLab
• Incident management servers like Jira and PagerDuty

A note on what's currently in development: We're building “bring-your-own” server support, allowing you to supply your own server image while the namespace handles hosting and operations. Please keep an eye out for the blog post about this!

Deploy server and connect it to SRE Agent

The following example deploys the SQL MCP server in Connector Namespace and connects it to Azure SRE Agent.

1. Server deployment

Prerequisite: Install the Azure Developer CLI (azd).

1. Clone the sql-server-samples repo:

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/sql-server-samples.git

2. Navigate to the azure-sql-mcp sample

cd sql-server-samples/samples/applications/azure-sql-mcp

3. From the azure-sql-mcp folder, run the following to log into your Azure subscription and then deploy the server and related resources:

azd auth login
azd up

The last command will prompt for the following before deployment:

4. Once deployment finishes, copy the MCP endpoint for use later. It looks similar to:

https://<app-name>.<region>.logic.azure.com/api/connectorGateways/123abc456defg7890/mcpServerConfigs/sql-mcp/mcp

5. (Optional) Test deployed server in Visual Studio Code GitHub Copilot: Open command palette > search MCP: Add server > pick HTTP > enter MCP endpoint and server name > pick Local Workspace. Inside .vscode/mcp.json, click Start above server name, then allow authentication with Microsoft in the popup and log into Azure subscription account. 

2. Configure MCP connector in SRE Agent

Connector Namespace does not create the connection in SRE Agent. Add the server endpoint through SRE Agent’s existing MCP connection experience.

1. Open the Azure SRE Agent portal
2. On the left menu, go to Builder > Connectors, and select + Add connector
3. Under Choose a connector, select the MCP tab, choose MCP server, and select Next
4. Configure the connector:

5. Select Next. Before testing the connection, grant the managed identity access to the MCP server.

3. Authorize the managed identity

1. Open the Azure portal, search for the managed identity by name.
2. In the identity’s Overview page, click JSON View (top right) and copy the tenantId and principalId. The principal ID is also called the object ID.
3. Open Connector Namespace portal and search for the deployed namespace.
4. Inside the namespace, navigate to the MCP Connectors tab on the left, then select the SQL MCP server.
5. Inside the MCP server, click Access Policies, then select Add Access Policy.
6. Enter the tenant ID and principal ID, then select Create.

4. Test and finish the connection

1. Return to Azure SRE Agent portal and select Test connection.
2. After the test succeeds, select the server tools the agent should use.
3. Select Add connector.

Establishing the connection can take a minute. Select Refresh at the top of the connectors page until its status changes to Connected. 

The agent can now use the selected server tools in chat threads. The azd deployment from previous created and seeded a SQL database with sample blog post data, so you can ask something like:

What are the top blog posts?

For more details, see MCP connectors and tools in Azure SRE Agent.

Focus on the server, not its infrastructure

MCP servers can give Azure SRE Agent access to the additional systems it needs to investigate incidents and perform operational work effectively. However, operating every remote server yourself introduces infrastructure, security, and maintenance responsibilities that distract from that goal.

Connector Namespace removes much of that friction. Your primary question becomes “Which MCP server do I want to host?” rather than “How will I deploy, secure, scale, monitor, and maintain it?”

Once deployed, the hosted endpoint can be added to Azure SRE Agent through its existing MCP connection experience. That gives teams a straightforward path to extending the agent with more operational tools, without turning MCP server hosting into another platform they must build and run.

Try Connector Namespace with Azure SRE Agent and share your feedback!

Resources

• Azure SRE Agent Overview
• Set up an MCP connector in Azure SRE Agent
• Connector Namespace Overview
• Hosted MCP servers in Connector Namespace