Analytics Nodes

Axon Server Enterprise Edition offers AI-powered insights into your event-driven applications through its Axon AI module. To optimize performance and resource allocation, Axon Server allows the configuration of dedicated Analytics nodes within a cluster.

Analytics nodes are specialized nodes within an Axon Server cluster that are designated to handle the processing and analysis of event data for AI insights. By offloading these tasks to dedicated nodes, the primary nodes can focus on core functionalities such as event storage and messaging, ensuring optimal performance for your applications.

Analytics nodes store event store data in a different format. This allows executing SQL queries on event data.

Axon Server Console has limited functionality on Analytics nodes. Most administrative tasks should be performed on primary nodes. It has one specific option: the Analytics tab, which allows you to query the events store through SQL and through natural language processing (NLP) queries.

An analytics node can also serve as an MCP server. For this you need to set the axoniq.axonserver.ai.mcp property to true. The MCP endpoint will then be available on that node at /mcp. It is using streamable HTTP as its transport type.

Configuring analytics nodes

Analytics nodes are dedicated nodes in an Axon Server cluster. The node must be configured with ANALYTICS role for all replication groups it serves. This can be done through the Axon Server administration interface or via the command line interface.

When configuring a node as an Analytics node, ensure that it has enough resources (CPU, memory, and storage) to handle the expected workload of AI processing and analytics tasks.

The following properties need to be configured for Analytics nodes:

  • axoniq.axonserver.analytics.eventlake.enabled: Set to true to enable analytics processing on the node.

  • axoniq.axonserver.ai.mcp: Set to true to enable the AI MCP server on the node.

  • axoniq.axonserver.ai.llm: The LLM used for insights. Uses claude-sonnet-4-5 by default.

Axon Server uses Anthropic’s Claude model for natural language processing (NLP) queries. To enable this functionality, you need to provide an API key for the Claude model. This can be done by setting the following environment variable on the Analytics node:

  • ANTHROPIC_API_KEY: Your API key for accessing the Claude model.

Authorizations

Running the Insights Agent requires the ANALYTICS role for a context.

Auto-cluster configuration

When using Axon Server’s auto-cluster configuration feature, you can specify a node should be Analytics nodes by including the axoniq.axonserver.autocluster.role=ANALYTICS property in the node’s configuration. With this property, the node will never initiate itself as the first node in the cluster, but will always join an existing cluster as an Analytics node.

Event payload types

Analytics nodes store event payloads as JSON. If the event payloads are not in JSON format, Axon Server will attempt to convert them to JSON when storing them on Analytics nodes. If the conversion fails, the payload will not be stored. If the payload is already in JSON format, no conversion is performed. To select the correct payload converter, you must set the axoniq.axonserver.event.payload-type property to one of the supported formats. This can be done as a global property or on a per-context basis.

Axon Server can convert payloads in the following formats to JSON:

  • XML (application/xml)

  • CBOR (application/cbor)