DevRel newsletter — October 2025

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Hello from the Elastic DevRel team! In this newsletter, we cover the new Agent Builder feature, free on-demand trainings, the latest blogs and videos, and upcoming events.

What’s new?

The journey of AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Elasticsearch has quickly evolved. Some milestones include:

While still in preview and behind a feature flag, you can already experiment with it on Elastic Cloud Serverless to transform ES|QL queries into reusable tools, group them into agents, and use them to solve multistep tasks on top of your Elasticsearch data:

  1. ES|QL as tools: Any ES|QL query — with joins, aggregations, vector or hybrid search, and geo queries — can be turned into a tool. Kibana ships with a set of defaults like get mappings or get documents by ID, but you can define your own domain-specific ones.

  2. Agents and Agent2Agent (A2A) orchestration: Tools can be combined into agents that execute sequences of steps automatically. With A2A support, those agents can even call each other, making it possible to compose workflows that cross boundaries between use cases.

  3. Conversations in Kibana: The new conversations interface in Kibana lets you try this directly: Type a natural-language question, and the built-in Elastic Inference Service (EIS) will call the right tool(s) to answer your request.

  4. Bring your own MCP client: Because all of this is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), your tools and agents are not locked into Kibana. You can connect them from any MCP-compatible client (e.g., Claude Desktop) using the documented configuration. No external MCP gateways are needed.

Why this matters:

  • Multistep reasoning on your data: Agents can plan, call tools, fetch and process data, and chain results together — beyond simple retrieval.

  • Composable and open: ES|QL tools can mix with others through MCP, giving you portable building blocks.
  • Direct in Kibana: No extra setup required on Elastic Cloud Serverless — just enable the preview and start experimenting.

Getting started:

  • Enable Agent Builder in the UI: Project Settings > Management > Advanced Settings > Elastic Agent Builder. Or, run the following command in DevTools:
POST kbn://internal/kibana/settings
{
   "changes": {
      ""agentBuilder:enabled": true
   }
}
  • Define your first tool and attach it to an agent in Kibana to try out the workflow:
  • Use the custom agent in a conversation directly in Kibana:
  • Or, take it to another MCP client of your choice like Claude Desktop. Be sure to use the Kibana endpoint (not Elasticsearch’s):
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "elastic-serverless": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "mcp-remote",
        "https://my-serverless.kb....elastic.cloud/api/chat/mcp",
        "--header",
        "Authorization:${AUTH_HEADER}"
      ],
      "env": {
        "AUTH_HEADER": "ApiKey X1.....=="
      }
    }
  }
}

If you are looking for a more in-depth guide, Elasticsearch Labs has the first full tutorial.

Upcoming events

Elastic{ON} Tour, the one-day Elastic conference series around the world, is back. Register and join us at the following locations:

  • San Francisco (AI-focused) — October 21, 2025

  • Amsterdam — October 30, 2025

  • Munich  — November 6, 2025

  • Paris — January 27, 2026

  • Silicon Valley (security-focused) — February 4, 2026 

  • London  — February 26, 2026

  • São Paulo  March 5, 2026

  • Sydney  March 5, 2026

  • Singapore  March 17, 2026

  • Washington, D.C.  March 19, 2026

  • Tokyo  TBD

Because we like to have a good representation of the Elastic Community on stage, please submit your ideas even if they’re still a bit raw. We're happy to iterate on them with you.

Join your local Elastic User Group chapter for the latest news on upcoming events! You can also find us on Meetup.com. If you’re interested in presenting at a meetup, send an email to [email protected].

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.