Overview
Welcome to ContextForge documentation.
This section introduces what ContextForge is, the gateway patterns it supports, and what core features and capabilities it offers out of the box.
What is ContextForge?
ContextForge is a production-grade AI gateway, registry, and proxy that sits in front of any MCP, A2A, or REST/gRPC APIs, exposing a unified control plane with centralized governance, discovery, and observability for all your AI needs. It optimizes agent and tool calling, supports plugins, and provides multiple gateway patterns:
- Tools Gateway — Federate MCP servers, REST APIs, and gRPC services into one composable tool catalog
- Agent Gateway — Route to A2A agents, OpenAI-compatible agents, and Anthropic agents
- Model Gateway — LLM proxy with OpenAI API spec, supporting watsonx, OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, vLLM, and more
- API Gateway — Rate limiting, auth, retries, and reverse proxy for REST services
- Plugin Extensibility — 40+ plugins for additional transports, protocols, and integrations
- Observability — OpenTelemetry tracing with Phoenix, Jaeger, Zipkin, and other OTLP backends
It also provides protocol enforcement, health monitoring, registry centralization, a visual Admin UI, and audit metadata capture — over HTTP, WebSockets, SSE, StreamableHttp, or stdio.
What's in This Section
| Page |
Description |
| Features |
Breakdown of supported features including federation, transports, and tool wrapping |
| Admin UI |
Screenshots and explanation of the interactive web dashboard |
| Quick Start |
Quick Installation and Start up |
1---2name: what-is-contextforge-23description: This section introduces what ContextForge is, the gateway patterns it supports, and what core features and capabilities it offers out of the box.4---5# Overview67Welcome to ContextForge documentation.89This section introduces what ContextForge is, the gateway patterns it supports, and what core features and capabilities it offers out of the box.1011---1213## What is ContextForge?1415**ContextForge** is a production-grade AI gateway, registry, and proxy that sits in front of any MCP, A2A, or REST/gRPC APIs, exposing a unified control plane with centralized governance, discovery, and observability for all your AI needs. It optimizes agent and tool calling, supports plugins, and provides multiple gateway patterns:1617- **Tools Gateway** — Federate MCP servers, REST APIs, and gRPC services into one composable tool catalog18- **Agent Gateway** — Route to A2A agents, OpenAI-compatible agents, and Anthropic agents19- **Model Gateway** — LLM proxy with OpenAI API spec, supporting watsonx, OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, vLLM, and more20- **API Gateway** — Rate limiting, auth, retries, and reverse proxy for REST services21- **Plugin Extensibility** — 40+ plugins for additional transports, protocols, and integrations22- **Observability** — OpenTelemetry tracing with Phoenix, Jaeger, Zipkin, and other OTLP backends2324It also provides protocol enforcement, health monitoring, registry centralization, a visual Admin UI, and audit metadata capture — over HTTP, WebSockets, SSE, StreamableHttp, or stdio.2526---2728## What's in This Section2930| Page | Description |31|------|-------------|32| [Features](features.md) | Breakdown of supported features including federation, transports, and tool wrapping |33| [Admin UI](ui.md) | Screenshots and explanation of the interactive web dashboard |34| [Quick Start](quick_start.md) | Quick Installation and Start up |
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