Altimate MCP Architecture Documentation

Overview

This document outlines the architecture of Altimate's MCP (Multi-Client Protocol) system, which serves as the core engine for managing tools and integrations across different platforms.

Core Components

1. MCP Engine

The MCP Engine is the central component of the system, responsible for managing the MCP server and tool integrations.

Key Responsibilities

• Server Management
  • Starting and stopping the MCP server
  • Tool registration and un-registration
  • Currently uses SSE transport (planned migration to stdio)

Tool Integration

• Supports multiple tool registration sources:
  • User-created datamates in SaaS
  • External sources (e.g., VSCode extensions)
• Validates connections per tool
• Exposes methods to CRUD connections (Update supports both remote and local connections)

Connection Management

• Storage: Connections are stored in ~/.altimate/connections.json
• Format: Key-value pairs for each tool (e.g., GitHub PAT token)
• Configuration Methods:
  • Local configuration
  • SaaS-based configuration

Additional Responsibilities:

• Tool usage tracking
• Guardrails incident monitoring

2. Altimate MCP Extension

Serves as the client interface for the MCP engine.

Key Features

• Provides registerTools method for others extension to register tools
• Creates and manages mcp.json in .vscode/.cursor directory
  • Contains MCP server URL configuration
  • Used by Cursor/VSCode for MCP server enablement

VSCode Integration

• vscode expects all the tools to be pre defined in package.json
• a custom extension is built dynamically with package.json containing all registered tools and installed it in the workspace.

3. SaaS Platform

Provides a user interface for managing datamates and monitoring system usage.

Features

• Datamate Creation
  • User-driven integration selection
  • Tool management
  • Connections management per integration
• Monitoring
  • Tool usage tracking
  • Guardrails incident reporting