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Bringing Third-Party Apps into Harness AI Chat: Our MCP Gateway for Distributed Enterprise Systems | Harness Blog

TLDR: When you work in Harness AI Chat, your work doesn't stop at Harness. Your pipelines live here, but the change you actually need to make might be a YAML file in GitHub, a Jira ticket, or a Confluence doc. So we built an MCP Gateway inside Harness that lets AI Chat reach those third-party apps for you: safely, under Harness's own access controls and secrets, and without dropped sessions across our distributed fleet. This is the story of what we built and why.

Your FY27 plan deserves a real AI number, not a hedge

Budget season is starting and most finance teams are finding the AI line is the most evasive line on the page. You lived through the year. AI spend came in higher than planned and moved in ways nobody could foresee or forecast. And when the board asked what it produced, the honest answer probably was “we’re working on it.”

Why is AI so expensive? The real cost drivers of AI

AI is expensive because the model bill is only part of the cost. Three components set the floor: model subscriptions, per-token API pricing, and infrastructure. Three more make it move: adapting models to your business, catching and fixing errors, and rising energy and datacenter costs. Efficiency doesn't fix it, because cheaper AI gets used more, not less. Businesses are willing to spend on AI. Research from Deloitte found that in 2025, 85% of organizations increased their AI investments.

No Custom Adapter: AI SRE Agent AURA Debugs Product Catalog in Dash0

The platform shows you which service is failing and which paths it touches, and stops there. Point AURA at the same telemetry and the cause comes back too. Dash0 shows the product catalog service in a failed state across the selected window, with errors on the path from the frontend service.

Kubernetes AI SRE Agent Finds a Crash Loop Nobody Asked About: AURA

You ask for a routine health check and expect a clean baseline. What came back was a pod that had restarted 788 times, unrelated to the question. AURA is connected to a Kubernetes cluster and to Prometheus through read-only MCP servers, running as one coordinator with two specialized workers. The prompt is one sentence: check the health of the cluster, and confirm whether all the pods are running. What comes back is not a baseline. AURA names the state as CrashLoopBackOff and attaches the restart count to it.

How I Support Humans in the AI Era

When our company pushed everyone to start using AI tools, I thought about what it would mean for my team. As a remote company, we are already challenged by the lack of organic human connection. Every connection is planned and takes effort, and now, AI adds another layer. People now spend part of their day collaborating with a tool rather than with a person, which can take away from the time we spend learning from each other.

Introducing the next generation of the BigPanda AI Incident Assistant

Effective incident response depends on having all of the context surrounding what’s happening. You have to understand your systems, services, architecture, and teams deeply enough to correctly interpret whatever alert just fired. Too often, that context doesn’t arrive packaged neatly in one place. Gathering and interpreting context correctly under time pressure is one of the most difficult parts of the job.

Where AI Media Actually Slows Teams Down - And It Isn't Generation

The constraint on AI-generated video and imagery inside most organisations is no longer the model. It is the review loop, the consistency of a set, and a cost model nobody agreed on in advance - and none of those three get solved by switching to a better generator. In short: budget for iteration rather than render time; build a reference library before the first deliverable; define what a project's generation allowance is up front; and evaluate models on how they respond to a single prompt edit rather than on peak output quality.

From Log Line to Merged Fix: AI SRE Agent AURA with GitHub MCP

Knowing why it broke is not the same as having it repaired. Point the agent at the repos behind the service and the change comes back as a pull request. A Govee integration crash-loops under Home Assistant because the container cannot write to a directory it does not own. That much was already established: the previous homelab video stopped at the root cause on purpose, so the next pass could improve the agent's configuration first.

Garbage in, garbage out: Splunk's Steve Flanders on why AI can't fix your bad telemetry

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Steve Flanders, who leads AI transformation at Splunk and wrote the book on OpenTelemetry, to talk about why AI acceleration without strong observability foundations creates more problems than it solves.