It appears that Compass has no provision to discover the topology of deployment, and instead it requires the user to specify replica set name in order to connect to a replica set. This was mentioned on SO here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61135528/mongodb-compass-forces-me-to-enter-replica-set-name-when-trying-to-connect-to-my/61135731#61135731 For example when I connected to mongodb://localhost:27020 where the node at 27020 is a secondary, I received this message: > An error occurred while loading navigation: 'not master and slaveOk=false': It is recommended to change your read preference in the connection dialog to Primary Preferred or Secondary Preferred or provide a replica set name for a full topology connection. As a user of Compass, I would like to specify the minimum required information for Compass to connect to my deployment. In case of a replica set, this is the address of a single node and I would like Compass to automatically determine set name and connect to all other nodes per the SDAM specification.