The Graph API for Agent Management at Scale

Everything covered so far in this series works from the point of view of one agent, or a handful. This final level shifts the lens to the scale a real enterprise actually operates at, thousands of agents, and the tooling that makes governing that many possible at all.

1 · Why clicking through a console does not scale

An admin console built around clicking into one agent at a time works perfectly well for ten agents. It quietly stops working somewhere well before ten thousand. Not because the console is badly designed, but because a human clicking through screens is fundamentally a linear, one-at-a-time process, and enterprise agent populations are not linear problems. Something has to let an administrator act on many agents at once, programmatically, or governance simply cannot keep pace with the scale agents are actually reaching.

2 · What the Graph API for agents provides

The Graph API for agent registry data, currently in preview, gives administrators “scalable and programmatic control over agent management.” Concretely, it lets administrators automate bulk agent management, streamline onboarding, and integrate governance into existing workflows across agents in Microsoft 365. Instead of manual, console-driven management, these application-programming-interface endpoints accelerate agent management, help maintain security and compliance, and ensure agents are available to the right users at the right time — all through code rather than clicks.

3 · Two endpoints: list everything, then drill into one

Two endpoints cover the bulk of day-to-day use. The list packages endpoint retrieves a complete list of every agent in the tenant, the whole inventory in a single call, ideal for compliance reporting or feeding straight into another system. The package detail endpoint retrieves rich metadata for one specific agent, everything needed to audit or investigate that agent closely.

This two-step rhythm, list everything broadly, then drill into one narrowly, is the same pattern any large-scale inventory system uses, whether tracking agents, servers, or any other fleet at enterprise volume. Both endpoints require the AI admin or global admin role, so this powerful, bulk-capable access stays appropriately restricted to the people responsible for it.

4 · The Agent Registry API and bulk onboarding

A companion capability handles onboarding at scale. The Agent Registry API lets an organisation register agent identity blueprints that were created some other way, perhaps directly through Microsoft Entra, but that do not yet appear in the unified Agent 365 registry. A batch endpoint covers registering many blueprints at once, so bringing an existing population of agents into the registry does not require registering each one individually by hand.

The recommended path going forward is simpler still: building with the Microsoft 365 Agents SDK handles agent identity creation and registration automatically, with no extra code, so newly built agents appear in the registry without anyone calling these APIs directly at all. The Graph and Registry APIs remain the right tool for bulk operations on agents that already exist outside that flow.

5 · The larger lesson: governance your automation can call

The pattern across this whole article is worth generalising. At real enterprise scale, governance cannot be something a human clicks through one screen at a time; it has to be something the organisation’s existing automation can call directly. A compliance report that used to mean someone manually exporting a screen’s worth of data at a time can instead be a scheduled script calling the list endpoint. A bulk onboarding project that used to mean registering agents one click at a time can instead be a batch call. This is the shift from managing agents to operating an agent fleet, and it is the shift this entire final level of the series is about.

6 · Glossary — every short-form term, spelled out

Graph API

Microsoft's programmatic interface for accessing and managing data across Microsoft 365, including, in preview, the agent registry.

List packages API

An endpoint that retrieves a complete list of every agent in a tenant.

Package detail API

An endpoint that retrieves rich metadata for one specific agent.

Agent Registry API

An API for registering agent identity blueprints, including in bulk via a batch endpoint, into the unified Agent 365 registry.

Batch endpoint

An API call that performs an operation, such as registration, across many items at once instead of one at a time.

AI admin / Global admin role

The administrative roles required to call the agent management Graph API endpoints.