Respond To Agent Incidents

The moment an agent is visibly broken in production is the wrong moment to be figuring out the process for the first time. This skill is that process: triage first, communicate honestly while you work, recover safely, and turn what you learn into something that survives past the incident.

This is not the skill for the calm, structured review of an agent's configuration - that is review-copilot-studio-agent. It is not for the disciplined ongoing measurement of answer quality - that is evaluate-agent-quality. It is for right now, something is broken, and people are affected.

Triage: find the layer before you fix anything

The single most time-wasting mistake in an incident is fixing the wrong layer. Work through these in order, because each rules out the ones below it:

1. Is this the platform, not the agent? Check Power Platform admin center service health, and Azure Service Health / Resource Health for anything Azure-hosted underneath. A platform-wide incident needs a very different response than a broken agent - mainly, stop changing things and wait, while communicating that you have identified it is not your configuration.
2. Is this a dependency the agent calls? A connector, an API, a Dataverse table, a model endpoint. If the agent's own configuration has not changed, look here before touching the agent at all.
3. Did something change recently? A deployment, a knowledge source update, a model version bump, a DLP policy edit. "What changed in the last 24-48 hours" answers more incidents than deep debugging does.
4. Is it actually the agent's configuration or behaviour? Only once the first three are ruled out does this become a review-copilot-studio-agent or copilot-studio-production-patterns problem, and by then you likely already know which.

Recovery: prefer rollback over live debugging under pressure

If a recent deployment is implicated, rolling back to the last known-good version is almost always faster and safer than debugging forward while users are affected. This depends on the ALM discipline already being in place - managed solutions, a settings file per environment, tracked versions - which is exactly what power-platform-alm-connection-refs covers. An incident is a bad time to discover that discipline was skipped.

Resist the urge to make an unrelated improvement while you are in there under pressure. An incident fix should do the smallest thing that restores service; anything else is a second, unreviewed change riding along with the first.

Communicating while it is still broken

Say what you know, what you do not yet know, and when you will next update - on a schedule, not only when you have an answer. A stakeholder who hears nothing for an hour assumes the worst; a stakeholder told "still investigating, next update in 20 minutes" tends to wait calmly.

Do not promise a root cause before you have one. "We have restored service by rolling back; we are still confirming what caused it" is honest and usually sufficient in the moment.

After: turn it into a prevention item, not a war story

A postmortem that only describes what happened is entertainment. It is worth doing when it answers, specifically:

• What signal would have caught this sooner - and is monitor-agent-telemetry actually wired up to produce it, or did this incident just reveal a gap?
• What made rollback slow or risky, if it was - usually an ALM or ownership gap that govern-agent-lifecycle or power-platform-alm-connection-refs would have caught earlier.
• One concrete action with a named owner and a date. A postmortem with no owned action item is a postmortem that will recur.

Do not

• Start debugging the agent's own configuration before checking platform and dependency health. It is the most common way to waste the first twenty minutes of an incident.
• Treat "it's back up" as resolved without understanding why. A recurrence a week later, unexplained, is worse for trust than the original incident.
• Skip the update cadence because there is nothing new to say. Silence is read as "still broken and nobody is working on it" even when that is false.
• Let a postmortem end without a named owner on at least one action. Naming nobody is how the same incident happens again.

Sources

Verified as resolving on 2026-08-19.

• View service health - Power Platform admin center: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/view-service-health
• Notifications for Business & Industry Copilot services: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/notifications-explained
• Azure Resource Health overview: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-health/resource-health-overview
• Power Platform ALM overview: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/alm/overview-alm

If a link 404s, the page was probably renamed. Say you could not verify it rather than guessing a replacement URL.