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Part 1: Subscribe to the Sourcing API and Review its Tools

In this first part of the lab, you'll register an application against the Sourcing API in Boomi's API Control Plane, retrieve your MCP credentials, and review the five tools the API exposes. Those five tools are what your agent will reason over in Part 2.

The Sourcing API is already deployed and registered in the platform as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool surface, so the five operations are visible to Agentstudio out of the box — no per-tool configuration needed.

In this part, you will:

  • Register an application in the Agentic Academy API Portal (this is the canonical Boomi pattern for governed API consumption — every customer agent that calls a Control Plane API does this).
  • Subscribe to the Sourcing API product and copy your AI Agent Key + MCP Address.
  • Locate the MCP-registered tool source in Agentstudio so you know exactly which tools you'll attach in Part 2.

Get Access to the Sourcing API​

Register an application against the Sourcing API product. This gets you an AI Agent Key and an MCP Address — the same governance pattern any production Boomi agent uses when it calls an MCP-exposed Control Plane API.

  1. Navigate to the Agentic Academy API Portal: https://aiplatformcoe-l6qlay.portal.na.controlplane.boomi.com/academy.

  2. In the left navigation, click API Products.

  3. Click the Sourcing API product card.

  4. On the Sourcing API overview page, click Get Access.

    The Create Account dialog opens with First Name, Last Name, and Email fields, plus a Login button on the bottom-right.

    • If you don't have a Boomi account, fill in First Name, Last Name, and Email, then click Create Account.
    • If you already have a Boomi account, click Login and sign in via Boomi SSO.

  5. Once logged in, you'll return to the Sourcing API product page. The left navigation now includes Applications and Users entries, and your name appears at the bottom-left.

Create an Application​

Applications are how the API Control Plane scopes credentials and traffic to a specific consumer — every agent in production gets its own application.

  1. In the left navigation, click Applications.

  2. Click Create New Application.

  3. In the Display Name field, enter: [builderInitials] Sourcing Agent

  4. Leave the Active toggle ON. Description can be left blank.

  5. Click Create New Application to save.

Subscribe to the Sourcing API​

With your application created, subscribe it to the Sourcing API product so it inherits the product's plan, quota, and credentials.

  1. In the left navigation, click API Products.

  2. Click the Sourcing API card.

  3. In the product's left sub-navigation, click Plans.

  4. On the Academy plan card, click Subscribe!.

  5. A New Subscription dialog appears with Step 1 of 2. Walk through the wizard — select your [builderInitials] Sourcing Agent application when prompted — and click Next through to the end to confirm.

    A green toast — "Subscription for Sourcing API deployed!" — confirms the subscription is active.

Retrieve Your MCP Credentials​

The subscription you just created carries the MCP credentials your tools will use at invocation time.

  1. In the left navigation, click Applications.

  2. Click your [builderInitials] Sourcing Agent application.

  3. In the application's left sub-navigation, click Subscriptions.

    You should see the Sourcing API subscription listed with a green Enabled badge and two action buttons: Secrets and Unsubscribe.

  4. Click Secrets.

    The Secrets to Access Locations dialog opens.

  5. Under MCP Credentials, save both values somewhere accessible:

    • AI Agent Key — the secret your agent passes when calling the MCP bridge.
    • MCP Address — the bridge URL Agentstudio dials into. Note the mcp-bridge subdomain and ?name=Sourcing_API query param — that's how you can tell at a glance this is an MCP endpoint, not a plain REST one.
    Why governance matters here

    Even though this workshop wires the tools through Boomi's MCP bridge for you, the application + subscription you just created is the same control point every production agent flows through:

    • One identity per consumer. Each agent — or each team running an agent — gets its own application, AI Agent Key, and MCP Address. When something misbehaves, you can revoke or rotate at the application level without touching the API itself.
    • Per-product subscriptions and plans. Access is granted by product, with rate limits, quotas, and SLAs attached to the plan. Agents inherit those guardrails automatically.
    • Auditable usage. Every call carries the application's key, so traffic, errors, and cost can be attributed back to a specific agent or team in the Control Plane.
    • One step to MCP. Flipping the Expose as Tool switch on the API product registered all five operations as MCP-compliant tools in this tenant — no per-tool wiring, no duplicate auth config. That's why the credentials you just retrieved are under MCP Credentials rather than a generic API key + base URL — the same governance you already apply to your REST APIs now applies to your agent tool surface.

    This is the production pattern: APIs governed in the Control Plane, agents consuming them through MCP, with a single audit trail tying the two together.

Access Agentstudio​

Now you'll switch to Agentstudio, where the MCP-exposed tool surface is already wired up.

  1. Login to the Boomi Platform: https://platform.boomi.com.

  2. Navigate to Agentstudio by selecting the Agentstudio icon in the top right corner.

    note

    This will open Agentstudio in a new window. Make sure pop-ups are enabled in your browser.

Review the Pre-Built MCP Tool Source​

We've already done this part for you

The workshop team has pre-registered the Sourcing API as an MCP tool source in this tenant, called Sourcing Agent Tools. We did this once, ahead of the workshop, by flipping the API Control Plane's Expose as Tool switch on the Sourcing API product — the platform read its OpenAPI schema and auto-registered all five operations as MCP-compliant tools. Every workshop participant shares this one tool source.

You don't need to create your own — and you shouldn't, because the source carries a tenant-level MCP-bridge credential that wouldn't be configured correctly if you cloned it. In a real engagement you'd build this once per environment using the same Expose-as-Tool flow; for the workshop, it's ready to use.

This section just walks you through finding it in Agentstudio so the tool names look familiar when you attach them to your agent in Part 2.

  1. In Agentstudio, click Tool Sources in the left navigation.

  2. Find the Sourcing Agent Tools entry in the source list.

  3. Open the source by clicking its name. Confirm the status is ACTIVE and the Imported Tools tab shows five tools:

    Tool nameHTTP methodPath
    sourcingagentapi--..._GET--sourcing-priceHistoryGET/sourcing/priceHistory
    sourcingagentapi--..._GET--sourcing-benchmarkRatesGET/sourcing/benchmarkRates
    sourcingagentapi--..._GET--sourcing-vendorsGET/sourcing/vendors
    sourcingagentapi--..._GET--sourcing-vendorRatingsGET/sourcing/vendorRatings
    sourcingagentapi--..._POST--sourcing-recommendationsPOST/sourcing/recommendations
    MCP tool naming

    MCP tool names are auto-generated from the source name + API ID + operation. The prefix (sourcingagentapi--...) tells you which source they came from; the suffix tells you the HTTP method and path. You don't need to memorize the full name — Part 2's tool-search step matches on the path (priceHistory, benchmarkRates, etc.).

  4. Do not edit the source. The headers (including the X-API-Key slot the MCP bridge fills at invocation time) are already configured, and changes here would break the tool surface for every participant in the room.

What You've Built​

You haven't built tools — the workshop did that ahead of time, exposed via Boomi's MCP tool surface. What you HAVE done:

  • Registered an application in API Control Plane against the Sourcing API product. Every agent that calls a Boomi Control Plane API does this — it's how API consumption is governed, metered, and traced in production.
  • Retrieved an AI Agent Key and MCP Address scoped to your application's subscription. In a production agent these would land in the agent's credential store; for this workshop they flow through the MCP bridge automatically.
  • Located the MCP-exposed tool surface in Agentstudio. You now know exactly which five tool names you'll attach to agent tasks in Part 2.

The five tools represent the capabilities of a Senior Sourcing Analyst:

  • Internal Price History (/sourcing/priceHistory) — anchor every recommendation in the buyer's real ERP purchase data.
  • External Market Benchmark (/sourcing/benchmarkRates) — compare against current market rates per SKU class.
  • Vendor Directory (/sourcing/vendors) — scope the candidate set to active, contract-eligible vendors.
  • Vendor Rating Lookup (/sourcing/vendorRatings) — balance price against on-time delivery, defect rate, and responsiveness.
  • Recommendation Output Writer (/sourcing/recommendations) — persist the structured ranked shortlist with rationale.

In Part 2, you'll bring these tools to life by attaching them to an intelligent agent that knows how to use them!