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Autonomous operations for the Azure Copilot Observability Agent are now in public preview, alongside the agent’s general availability. With autonomous operations enabled, the Observability Agent listens to your alerts as they fire, triages them in the background, and runs deep investigations on the issues it creates. Along the way, it correlates related alerts into a single issue – so your team starts from a small set of explained, investigated issues instead of a stream of raw alerts.

Until now, teams invoked the agent when they needed it – an interactive assistant, ready to investigate when you pointed it at a problem. Now it also prepares triage context continuously, on its own, while people stay responsible for decisions and any change to the environment.

See autonomous operations in action. The Observability Agent triages incoming alerts, correlates related ones into a single Azure Monitor issue, and runs a deep investigation automatically, with no human trigger.

From alerts to answers

Azure Monitor already gives you strong signals when something is wrong – across both metric and log alerts. Dynamic thresholds learn normal behavior and flag anomalies automatically, and that same anomaly detection now extends to log search alerts and, in preview, to Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. Smart detection in Application Insights surfaces failures and performance anomalies without manual rules.

The hard part is what happens next: connecting dozens of alerts, working out what they share, and figuring out what’s actually going on – before anyone can act. That’s the work that still lands on a person, often in the middle of the night. It’s exactly where the Observability Agent comes in.

What’s in the public preview

In public preview, you can enable the Observability Agent to:

• Promote individual prominent alerts into issues when you configure that with custom instructions.


• Run a deep investigation automatically on every issue it creates.


• Correlate related alerts into a single Azure Monitor issue, with a natural-language explanation of why they belong together.

You provision the agent once as a resource in your Azure environment – a dedicated identity to scope, govern, and assign autonomous tasks to – then turn on autonomous operations and it gets to work.

What it changes for your team

The outcome is fewer things to look at and faster triage:

• Your team works from a short queue of meaningful issues, not a constant stream of alerts.


• Each issue arrives with context, reasoning, and an investigation already attached.


• Low-priority issues can be reviewed and dismissed in seconds.


• The assembly work that used to come first now happens before anyone is paged.

People still make every decision and every change. The agent just makes sure they start with full context.

How it works

• Your own instructions. Topology shows how services connect, but your team knows which boundaries matter: ownership, escalation paths, and the alerts that should always become issues. Custom instructions let you capture that in plain language and apply it going forward. For example:
  “The billing service is owned by a different team with a separate on-call rotation. Even when billing alerts fire alongside clinical service alerts, treat them as separate issues.”
  Instructions shape how the agent correlates and creates issues. They don’t grant permissions, bypass Azure RBAC, or change resources.
  
  


• Automatic topology discovery. Point the agent at your Application Insights resource and it maps services, dependencies, and how they relate. That map becomes persisted knowledge the agent builds and reuses – the same context that grounds both its correlation decisions and its deep investigations, so reasoning reflects your real architecture instead of starting from scratch each time.
  
  


• Deeper investigations. When the agent investigates a correlated issue, it starts from the whole picture: every related alert, every impacted resource, and the reasoning correlation already produced. The result is sharper root-cause hypotheses and recommendations that account for the full scope of impact.

In practice

A database latency spike triggers alerts across checkout, billing, and recommendation services. Without autonomous operations, each alert is triaged on its own.

With autonomous operations enabled, the Observability Agent groups the related alerts into one issue, explains the shared timeline, and starts investigating automatically. Because your custom instructions define billing as a separate ownership boundary, its alerts become a distinct issue routed to that team’s rotation.

Responders start from two clear, ownership-aligned issues – each already investigated – instead of dozens of isolated alerts.

What’s next

Autonomous operations mark the next step for the Observability Agent: from user-invoked analysis to continuous preparation. The agent assembles the context, explains the issue, and runs the investigation; your team reviews the evidence and decides what to do.

And once issues are created, you can act on them. Azure Monitor issues connect to Action Groups, so approved actions can flow into your existing workflows – more on that in a future post.

Next steps

• Learn how to get started with the Azure Copilot Observability Agent.


• Review the preview details in Autonomous operations in the Observability Agent.


• Explore how investigations work in Deep investigations in the Observability Agent.


• Learn how teams preserve context with Azure Monitor issues.

Stay connected

• Follow this blog for ongoing deep dives, updates on current capabilities, and a preview of what’s coming next.


• Live webinar
  A walkthrough of real Observability Agent scenarios, best practices, and what’s available today, along with a look at what’s coming next and live Q&A with the product team. Register for the Observability Agent webinar

We’d love your feedback

The Observability Agent continues to evolve based on real-world usage and operator feedback. Share your thoughts directly through the Give Feedback option in the experience or reach us at azureobsagent@microsoft.com.