Challenges of MCP in Enterprise Application Scenarios

[zhenjunMa]

Pre-submission Checklist

• I have verified this would not be more appropriate as a feature request in a specific repository
• I have searched existing discussions to avoid duplicates

Your Idea

Background

Currently, many community users integrate MCP via stdio in personal desktop AI assistants. However, we should also consider MCP used in enterprise environments. Here, I summarize challenges we encountered when introducing MCP to enterprise scenarios and hope to discuss potential solutions with the community.

A key distinction between enterprise and personal AI assistant scenarios is that MCP Servers are deployed on servers rather than locally.

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Gateway Case

In this scenario, MCP Clients must send requests to a gateway, which then forwards them to specific MCP Servers. This requires clients to pass the target MCP Server name to the gateway.

Option 1:

headers = {
    "mcp-server-name": "xxx" 
}
sse_client("http://gateway.com/sse", headers=headers)

Option 2:

sse_client("http://gateway.com/${mcp-server-name}/sse")

In this option, the server must also include the MCP Server Name in SSE responses:

endpoint:
${mcp-server-name}/message?session_id=xxx

Subsequent requests would then use:

http://gateway.com/${mcp-server-name}/message?session_id=xxx

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Session Recovery Case

After a session is established between an MCP Client and an MCP Server, how can we recover if the server becomes unavailable (e.g., crashes)? This recovery scenario is independent of whether requests pass through a gateway.

In the current implementation, failures are only detected when the client send a new request (e.g., call_tool), resulting in task failures and degraded user experience.

Option 1:
In the current SDK implementation, after a session is established between an MCP Client and an MCP Server, the Server sends a ping message to the Client every 15 seconds. If the client fails to receive any ping message for over 15 seconds, can we re-initiate the SSE connection? This would allow the client to establish a new session with other available instances of the same MCP Server.

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Observability

Related discussions:

• [Proposal] Adding OpenTelemetry Trace Support to MCP
• Adding Opentelemetry to MCP SDK

I have already seen many discussions about Trace in the community and I will continue to follow the community’s progress in this area.

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MCP Server Registry

Related discussions:

• MCP Server Registry
• .well-known/mcp directory

For enterprise MCP Server Registry implementations, in addition to discovering MCP Servers themselves, we also need their service addresses. Therefore, extensible fields should be added to the published metadata to accommodate customized requirements across different scenarios.

Scope

• Protocol Specification
• SDK Features
• Documentation
• Developer Experience
• Other

[KDwevedi]

Hey
I'm currently trying to setup an MCP server for an enterprise scenario, mentioning a specific problem we're facing.

SSE is the only remote transport available out of the box.

SSE-based MCP servers currently seem to not support scaling via replicas out of the box. This is due to each request relying on a server-generated session ID, which is not shared across replicas.

Workarounds for this problem seem to be limited to:

• forking the SDK to implement a shared, external store for session_ids
• implement a different transport (say, HTTP Streams)
• or implement sticky sessions for the request durations (defeating the point of replicas in many ways)

[deadvait28]

they are planning to implement HTTP in the SDK soon I think.

[KDwevedi]

Oh, are they?
Would you know about any place where I could follow progress on that?

[zhenjunMa]

The support for streamable HTTP at the transport level has been added to the specification, which can be referenced at: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/basic/transports#streamable-http. Currently, SDKs for various programming languages are also under development in the community. You can check the PR list of the related projects for more details.