Agent Registry categorizes agentic components of your ecosystem into three main types that you can discover within your environment:
- Agents: Autonomous actors that possess specific skills. Skills represent an agent's high-level capabilities and are a primary mechanism for discovery.
- MCP servers: Providers of standardized data resources and tools. Tools are deterministic functions exposed by an MCP server that agents can invoke to perform specific actions.
- Endpoints: Target URLs, typically REST APIs, accessed by an agent. By abstracting these destinations into manageable resources, Agent Registry lets you centrally govern which external APIs your agents can access.
For more information about these and other concepts that Agent Registry uses, see Key concepts.
The Agent Registry API separates read and write operations. In Agent Registry, a
Service is a writable API resource
representing an agent, an MCP server, or an endpoint that you manually add to
your registry. Agent Registry also automatically registers agents
and servers deployed on supported Google Cloud runtimes.
Register and manage your agents, MCP servers, and endpoints by enabling the
Agent Registry API API. You can use the writable Service resource to manually
create, update, and delete entries in your registry. Then query the read-only
Agent, McpServer, or Endpoint resources to get, list, and search for
your registered agents, servers, and endpoints, respectively.
To get started, see Set up Agent Registry.
Register agentic components in your registry
Agent Registry maintains your catalog of agents and MCP servers through two
registration mechanisms: automatic and manual. Use the Service resource to
create, update, and delete entries manually.
| Registration mechanism | Description | Registered component | Supported Google Cloud products |
|---|---|---|---|
| Automatic registration | You can configure and use Agent Registry to automatically discover and ingest specific resources deployed on supported Google Cloud runtimes. For agents implementing the open Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, the registry also automatically extracts their skills and capabilities from their Agent Card. | Agents |
|
| MCP servers | Official Google and Google Cloud remote MCP servers | ||
| Manual registration |
For external resources, custom agentic components on unsupported
runtimes, or standard REST agents that don't implement the A2A
protocol, you must manually register them by creating a
Service resource in the registry.
|
Agents | Remote agents |
| MCP servers | Custom agentic components on unsupported runtimes or external MCP servers |
What's next
- Review key concepts to familiarize yourself with the essential terms used in Agent Registry.
- Set up Agent Registry.
- Learn about the difference between automatic and manual registration for agents.