SaaS Quickstart
Get ShieldAgent monitoring your AI agents in under 5 minutes — no proxy to deploy, no infrastructure to manage.
01Sign up for ShieldAgent
Create your account at app.shieldagent.io/signup. Your workspace is provisioned instantly — no credit card required to start.
What you get
- 1 tenant, multiple agents
- Real-time audit dashboard
- Pre-built policy templates
- EU AI Act compliance reports
02Create your first tenant
A tenant is an isolated workspace for a team or project. In the dashboard, go to Settings → Tenants → New Tenant.
You can create multiple tenants to isolate different teams or environments (dev / staging / prod).
03Register your AI agent
Go to Agents → Register Agent. Give it a name and description. ShieldAgent generates an agent key — this is the credential your AI agent will use to authenticate with our proxy endpoint.
Copy the agent key now — it won't be shown again. You can rotate it any time from the agent settings.
04Point your agent at the ShieldAgent proxy
Update your AI agent's MCP configuration to route through ShieldAgent instead of connecting directly to your MCP server. The SaaS proxy endpoint is shown in the dashboard under Settings → Connection.
mcp-config.json
{
"mcpServers": {
"filesystem": {
"url": "https://proxy.shieldagent.io/mcp",
"headers": {
"Authorization": "Bearer sa_live_YOUR_AGENT_KEY",
"X-Upstream": "https://your-mcp-server.example.com"
}
}
}
}Replace sa_live_YOUR_AGENT_KEY with the key from Step 03 and X-Upstream with your actual MCP server URL.
05Watch events in the dashboard
As your agent makes tool calls, they appear in real time in the Events tab. Each entry shows:
- ▸The tool name and arguments (redacted per your DLP policy)
- ▸The policy decision: ALLOW / DENY / TRANSFORM
- ▸Risk score and which rule triggered
- ▸Latency added by the proxy (typically <2 ms)
No setup required — events stream automatically as long as your agent is routing through the proxy.
Deployment Options
ShieldAgent SaaS is the fastest path to protection. Compare with self-hosted options:
| Feature | SaaS | BYOC / Self-hosted | On-Prem |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup time | < 5 minutes | 30–60 minutes (Docker) | Days (air-gapped) |
| Data residency | EU region (default) | Your VPC / cloud | Fully on-prem |
| Customization | Config only | Full (env vars + policy-as-code) | Full (source available) |
| SLA | 99.9% uptime SLA | Your infra SLA | Your infra SLA |
| Pricing model | Usage-based | Self-run costs | Contact us |
Troubleshooting
Connection refused / ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSEDCause: Proxy not reachable from your agent.
Fix: Verify your MCP config uses the proxy URL shown under Settings → Connection. Confirm outbound HTTPS to proxy.shieldagent.io on port 443 is allowed by your network.
401 UnauthorizedCause: Agent key missing, incorrect, or revoked.
Fix: Copy the agent key from Settings → Agents and update the Authorization header in your MCP config. Agent keys are shown once at creation — rotate to get a new one.
Events tab empty after tool callsCause: Traffic is not routing through ShieldAgent.
Fix: Confirm your MCP config URL points to the ShieldAgent proxy, not directly to your MCP server. The X-Upstream header must be set to your actual MCP server URL.