SSE Transport

Agno’s MCP integration supports the SSE transport. This transport enables server-to-client streaming, and can prove more useful than stdio when working with restricted networks.

This transport is not recommended anymore by the MCP protocol. Use the Streamable HTTP transport instead.

To use it, initialize the MCPTools passing the URL of the MCP server and setting the transport to sse:

from agno.agent import Agent
from agno.models.openai import OpenAIResponses
from agno.tools.mcp import MCPTools

server_url = "http://localhost:8000/sse"

# Initialize and connect to the SSE MCP server
mcp_tools = MCPTools(url=server_url, transport="sse")
await mcp_tools.connect()

try:
    agent = Agent(model=OpenAIResponses(id="gpt-5.2"), tools=[mcp_tools])
    await agent.aprint_response("What is the license for this project?", stream=True)
finally:
    # Always close the connection when done
    await mcp_tools.close()

You can also use the server_params argument to define the MCP connection. This way you can specify the headers to send to the MCP server with every request, and the timeout values:

from agno.tools.mcp import MCPTools, SSEClientParams

server_params = SSEClientParams(
    url=...,
    headers=...,
    timeout=...,
    sse_read_timeout=...,
)

# Initialize and connect using server parameters
mcp_tools = MCPTools(server_params=server_params, transport="sse")
await mcp_tools.connect()

try:
    # Use mcp_tools with your agent
    pass
finally:
    await mcp_tools.close()

Complete example

Let’s set up a simple local server and connect to it using the SSE transport:

1. Setup the server

   sse_server.py

   from mcp.server.fastmcp import FastMCP
   
   mcp = FastMCP("calendar_assistant")
   
   
   @mcp.tool()
   def get_events(day: str) -> str:
       return f"There are no events scheduled for {day}."
   
   
   @mcp.tool()
   def get_birthdays_this_week() -> str:
       return "It is your mom's birthday tomorrow"
   
   
   if __name__ == "__main__":
       mcp.run(transport="sse")
   
2. Setup the client

   sse_client.py

   import asyncio
   
   from agno.agent import Agent
   from agno.models.openai import OpenAIResponses
   from agno.tools.mcp import MCPTools, MultiMCPTools
   
   # This is the URL of the MCP server we want to use.
   server_url = "http://localhost:8000/sse"
   
   
   async def run_agent(message: str) -> None:
       # Initialize and connect to the SSE MCP server
       mcp_tools = MCPTools(transport="sse", url=server_url)
       await mcp_tools.connect()
   
       try:
           agent = Agent(
               model=OpenAIResponses(id="gpt-5.2"),
               tools=[mcp_tools],
               markdown=True,
           )
           await agent.aprint_response(message=message, stream=True, markdown=True)
       finally:
           await mcp_tools.close()
   
   
   # Using MultiMCPTools, we can connect to multiple MCP servers at once, even if they use different transports.
   # In this example we connect to both our example server (SSE transport), and a different server (stdio transport).
   async def run_agent_with_multimcp(message: str) -> None:
       # Initialize and connect to multiple MCP servers with different transports
       mcp_tools = MultiMCPTools(
           commands=["npx -y @openbnb/mcp-server-airbnb --ignore-robots-txt"],
           urls=[server_url],
           urls_transports=["sse"],
       )
       await mcp_tools.connect()
   
       try:
           agent = Agent(
               model=OpenAIResponses(id="gpt-5.2"),
               tools=[mcp_tools],
               markdown=True,
           )
           await agent.aprint_response(message=message, stream=True, markdown=True)
       finally:
           await mcp_tools.close()
   
   
   if __name__ == "__main__":
       asyncio.run(run_agent("Do I have any birthdays this week?"))
       asyncio.run(
           run_agent_with_multimcp(
               "Can you check when is my mom's birthday, and if there are any AirBnb listings in SF for two people for that day?"
           )
       )
   
3. Run the server

   python sse_server.py
   
4. Run the client

   python sse_client.py