First-generation Foundry Agent Service API, based on threads, messages and runs. It is deprecated, replaced by conversations and responses, and retires on 31 March 2027.
Also called threads, runs, messages.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Agents (classic) API in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Foundry Agent Service
Fully managed Microsoft Foundry offering in which prompt, voice and hosted agents are created, deployed, run and scaled. Models, tools, guardrails, versioning, tracing and network isolation all come built in.
- API
Short for application programming interface: a contract that client code calls programmatically, for example a web API secured with tokens or the Files, Images or Responses APIs.
Related terms
- acr purge
A container command, currently in preview, that runs as an ACR task either on demand or on a schedule. It removes tags matching a repository and tag regex once they pass a given age, can also clear untagged manifests, and anything it deletes is gone for good.
- Adaptive target file size
A Spark setting in Fabric that chooses the target file size for each Delta table based on how big the table is, starting at 128 MB for small tables and rising towards 1 GB for very large ones, and reconsiders the choice every time
OPTIMIZEruns. It is enabled by default in Runtime 2.0 and removes the need to tune the olderdelta.targetFileSizeproperty by hand. - ADM
The Architecture Development Method is a proven, iterative and repeatable way to develop and manage architectures. It runs through a Preliminary Phase and Phases A to H, with Requirements Management sitting in the middle.
- Advanced hunting
Threat-hunting feature of the Microsoft Defender portal that runs KQL over 30 days of raw Defender XDR data, plus onboarded Sentinel data, and supports custom detections. It finds activity after it happens rather than blocking it.
- Agent Monitoring Dashboard
View in Microsoft Foundry, powered by Application Insights, that tracks token consumption, latency, successful runs and evaluation scores and can raise alerts. It gives visibility at runtime and is not a gate for releases.
- Agentless malware scanning
Snapshot-based malware check for VM disks that runs Microsoft Defender Antivirus engines with no agent installed. It comes with Defender for Servers Plan 2, not with Defender CSPM by itself.
- Analyst
A reasoning agent built by Microsoft that comes alongside Researcher for people with a Microsoft Copilot licence, and writes and runs code to work through raw data such as multiple spreadsheets. Agent settings don't govern it, because it belongs to the core Copilot Chat experience.
- ANALYZE TABLE
The
ANALYZE TABLE ... COMPUTE STATISTICSstatement gathers statistics on a table and its columns so the cost-based optimiser can plan queries better. On Unity Catalog managed tables, predictive optimization runsANALYZEfor you.