microsoft / microsoft/sre-agent
[Feature Request] Cross-instance agent handoff — Agent A hands off investigation to Agent B
- Dominant language
- PowerShell
- Stars
- 160
- Forks
- 97
- Avg merge
- 2d 5h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 12
Description
## Problem
Azure SRE Agent supports **custom agent (sub-agent) handoffs within the same parent agent**, but there is no native mechanism for **cross-instance handoff** — where Agent A (e.g., an ops orchestrator) hands off an investigation to Agent B (e.g., a product-specific agent) running as a separate Azure resource.
## Current Behavior
- Custom agents within the **same parent** can hand off via handoff rules — this works well for domain specialization within a single agent
- Cross-instance handoff (Agent A → Agent B, where A and B are separate `Microsoft.App/agents` resources) is **not supported**
- Workaround: Agent A creates a work item with full context (evidence, KQL results, thread link), and the engineer manually opens a new thread on Agent B referencing the work item
## Proposed Solution
1. **Native cross-instance handoff API** — Agent A invokes Agent B via a platform-managed handoff, passing context (thread summary, evidence, resource IDs, severity)
2. **Shared investigation context** — the receiving agent gets a structured context payload, not just a raw text dump
3. **Bidirectional handoff** — Agent B can hand back to Agent A with results (e.g., product agent completes RCA, hands result back to ops agent for mitigation)
4. **Audit trail** — both agents' threads link to each other for traceability
## Use Case
In a **multi-agent topology**, a central operations agent detects issues across all products, while specialized product agents have deep domain knowledge and connected product repos. When the ops agent detects an exception burst in a specific product, it should hand off to the product-specific agent which has the relevant source code connected, product-specific skills, and architecture knowledge. Today this requires manual human intervention to bridge the two agents.
## Impact
- **High** — critical for multi-agent topologies where specialization is distributed across agent instances
- Enables true **agentic orchestration** patterns (orchestrator + specialists)
- Reduces MTTR by eliminating the manual bridge between agents
## Environment
- Azure SRE Agent (GA)
Contributor guide
No contributing guide indexed for this repository
Research direction
No repository files, tests, or implementation entry points are named. Start by reviewing the existing same-parent handoff behavior and the proposed cross-instance requirements; done would include a supported handoff with structured context, return routing, and linked audit trails.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- azure
- Domain
- ai-infra-agents, cloud
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 30/100