DataPower Interact Gateway overview

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DataPower Interact Gateway extends your existing API management infrastructure with AI management capabilities to govern, secure, and monitor how applications and AI agents interact with AI models, APIs, and enterprise services.

Traditional API gateways enable organizations to securely expose and manage REST APIs by applying governance policies to control how applications interact with enterprise services. As organizations evolve from traditional automation to AI‑driven workflows, enterprise applications and AI agents increasingly rely on AI models, enterprise APIs, and enterprise services to automate and orchestrate business processes.

These interactions introduce new integration and governance requirements, including securing access to AI services, controlling AI usage, monitoring AI consumption, and enforcing consistent policies across teams and applications. Without a unified interface to govern these interactions, organizations risk fragmented AI environments where enterprise APIs and AI services are consumed inconsistently with limited governance and visibility.

DataPower Interact Gateway addresses these requirements by providing a centralized AI management and governance layer that controls how applications and AI agents access AI models and enterprise services. Built on the DataPower® Nano Gateway, DataPower Interact Gateway enables organizations to govern, secure, and monitor AI interactions without introducing a separate AI infrastructure.

DataPower Interact Gateway supports two primary AI interaction patterns:
  • Model Context Protocol (MCP) Gateway

    Exposes existing APIs as MCP-compliant tools that AI agents can discover and invoke. You can also register external (third-party) MCP servers. For details, see Creating MCP tools.

  • LLM Gateway

    Provides governed access to external LLM provider APIs. Applications and AI agents access LLM providers through managed endpoints. For details, see Registering LLM providers.

DataPower Interact Gateway also supports Bring your own coding assistant (BYOCA) capability, which enables you to automate DataPower Interact Gateway tasks such as registering LLM providers, generating MCP servers from Rest APIs through natural language prompts. For details, see Bring your own coding assistant (BYOCA).
Note: Throughout this documentation, AI assets refer to MCP tools and LLM provider APIs.

AI assets lifecycle

DataPower Interact Gateway supports creating, securing, publishing, consuming, and analyzing AI assets. Different capabilities in DataPower Interact Gateway support each phase of the lifecycle.

Lifecycle phase Description
Create, secure, and publish Create, configure, secure, and publish AI assets from IBM API Studio in DataPower Interact Gateway.

For details, see Managing MCP tools and LLM providers using IBM API Studio.
Enforce policies Process AI traffic and enforce runtime policies using DataPower Nano Gateway.

For details, see Configuring policies.
Discover and consume Enable developers, applications, and AI agents to discover and subscribe to AI assets using Developer Portal.

For details, see Using Developer Portal documentation.
Monitor and analyze Monitor AI usage, performance, and operational metrics using Analytics.

For details, see Monitoring MCP tools and LLM APIs using Analytics.