What is AI Agent Routing

AI Registry Routing & Observability Functionality

Registry providers often provide routing capabilities to deployed endpoints. This is most often models that an agent can be injected at runtime and executed (as a prompt) or it can also be deployed agents as stand alone applications.

Routing

Agents can contain endpoints where the agent is deployed or where the AI model capable of running the agent (prompt) is deployed. Registries can provide add-on routing capabilities which can help organizations with access standardization.

It is important to understand that there are many routing (gateway) systems that offer routing as their main capability. They can offer registry features as an add-on to their users, but they will make it as their bread-n-butter to provide routing capabilities.

This means, a registry and a gateway are two different things and are not to be confused. They often work hand in hand to provide a vertically integrated system.

Health Monitoring & Heartbeats

For deployed agents, a registry can maintain a hearbeat which verifies that an agent is available for requests. This is useful for apps accessing agents that are supposed to be online, it keeps the listing of live agents up to date and ensures endpoint provider maintains a healthy set of agents if they want to continue to be listed in the registry.

Audit Logging and Observability

Gateway systems tend to implement observability and logging as second core functionality (to the routing function). This goes beyond core metrics as the system will keep track of usage. Agent authors can get stats about when an agent is used, how often, and other useful anonymized stats. This is also helpful for teams to understand usage patterns and debug integration issues. This data can be aggregated at platform level, especially for enterprise systems such higher level usage metrics are mission critical to have.

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