Fabric Operations Agent

Fabric Operations Agent: the definition file and its ALM consequences

Everything below was verified 2026-09-02. The item, its Git integration, its deployment-pipeline support and Investigator insights are all preview — re-check dated claims before relying on them.

This skill is about the file. The portal click-path is documented and not repeated here; what is not documented is what Configurations.json means once it is committed.

1. Item identity

Two files per item and nothing else.

The REST docs do not list this item type. Item definition overview enumerates ~30 types under Definition Details for Supported Item Types and Operations Agent is not among them. That is not evidence of "no item definition" — the schema above is live and returns 200. Same pattern as fabric-realtime-dashboard and fabric-graph: a hand-editable definition whose contract lives at a schema URL rather than in the API reference.

One item type, two front doors. Real-Time Intelligence documents the general item; Data Factory documents Operations Agent for Pipelines, which is a preconfigured generation path from the pipeline canvas ribbon — its own step 4 says you select Open Agent Configuration to "view your operations agent item", and step 5 shows the same Save/Start/Stop ribbon. There is also an ontology-grounded front door in IQ. All three write this same Configurations.json.

2. The ALM listing trap

Look for its Git story under Data Factory, not Real-Time Intelligence. Git integration → Supported items carries Operations Agent (preview) in the Data Factory items group, linking to the pipeline page. The Real-Time Intelligence group lists ten items and not this one. Deployment pipelines files it the same way.

Reasoning "it is an RTI item, so its Git story is on the RTI Git page" finds nothing and concludes it is unsupported. It is supported, in both, and both say preview.

3. The definition schema

JSON Schema draft-07. Root is additionalProperties: false and all three keys are required:

identity accepts only sponsor. The schema notes that server-generated identity fields are read-only and excluded, which is why the Entra Agent ID never appears in Git.

Every enum is closed:

• dataSource.type ∈ KustoDatabase, Ontology. Requires id, type, workspaceId.
• action.kind ∈ PowerAutomateAction, FabricJobAction, with a draft-07 if/then: connection is required iff kind is FabricJobAction. An action also requires id, displayName and description.
• messageDestination is a oneOf discriminated on kind — Recipient {kind, recipient (a UPN)} or TeamsChannel {kind, teamId, channelId}. Both additionalProperties: false.
• fabricItemConnection requires jobArtifactId, jobWorkspaceId, itemType, jobType, optionally subItemId, and is additionalProperties: false. The first two are format: uuid.

parameter is {name, description} — name required, additionalProperties: false, and no value field. See §6.

4. What survives a cross-workspace deployment

This is the section to read before parameterising anything, and it is where the intuitive answer is wrong.

Item references in this file are logicalIds, not runtime IDs — but in two different encodings.

• dataSource.id is the source item's .platform logicalId, character for character. Open the monitored KQL database's .platform and you will find the same string.

• jobArtifactId is the target item's logicalId with its 16 bytes reversed. Reversing is an involution, so it round-trips:

  import uuid
  rev = lambda g: str(uuid.UUID(bytes_le=uuid.UUID(g).bytes_le[::-1]))
  
  # synthetic illustration
  rev("7c4d1e88-93af-4b02-9d61-2fa50c7e3b14")
  # -> '0c7e3b14-2fa5-9d61-4b02-93af7c4d1e88'   the .platform logicalId form
  

  This is also why a logicalId so often has a version nibble that is not 4 — a reversed v4 GUID does not look like a v4 GUID. The encoding is systematic rather than a property of this item type: 79 reversals with zero failures, across two Git-synced repos (74 of 76) and ~20 unrelated public repos and tenants, where every id is a valid v4 in exactly one of the two forms. Measured 2026-09-02, widened 2026-09-03.

  The reversed form is the runtime item ID — confirmed 2026-09-03 against GET /v1/workspaces/{ws}/items over 19 workspaces. Of the local logicalIds whose reversal resolved to anything, 21 of 21 hit a real item carrying the same displayName and type. No reversal landed on a different item, and no raw logicalId was itself an item ID. The remaining 16 were absent from every visible workspace, so they neither confirm nor refute.

  The precondition matters more than the rule. This holds for items created in the portal. An item authored git-first — committed as files, then synced into the workspace — carries a fresh client-side v4 that encodes nothing, and reversing it yields a GUID that is not an item ID at all. Classifying by whether an item's oldest commit is a Fabric portal sync separated the two forms 76 of 76 with no cross-cases in the source repos. Neither git-first item resolved against the API, so that half is consistent but untested.

  Do not conclude that logicalId and the runtime item ID are interchangeable. They are still different strings and substituting one for the other still fails — see fabric-gotchas on PowerBIEntityNotFound. What the confirmation buys is the derivation — reverse it yourself, offline — not a licence to paste one where the other belongs.

• jobWorkspaceId is a plain workspace ID. Workspaces have no logicalId, so this is the one value in the file that genuinely does not travel between environments. Rebind it with find_replace in fabric-cicd's parameter.yml, or a deployment rule.

The parameterisation asymmetry is a schema fact, not a portability one. configuration.dataSources maps an alias to either a dataSource object or a variable-reference string:

"pattern": "^\\$\\(/[^/]+/[^/]+/[^/]+\\)$"

described as "Reference to a variable in a Fabric variable library, in the form $(/<WorkspaceName>/<LibraryName>/<VariableName>)". Nothing equivalent exists on fabricItemConnection, which is additionalProperties: false. So a data source can be swapped per environment through a variable library and an action target cannot.

Two caveats on that, both dated 2026-09-02. The variable library supported-items list names seven consumers — Pipeline, lakehouse shortcut, Notebook, Dataflow Gen 2, Copy job, User data functions, Plan — and Operations Agent is not one of them. The schema permits the string; nobody has confirmed the service resolves it. Round-trip it before relying on it, and if it does not resolve, that is the finding worth recording.

5. shouldRun is deployed running state, and running costs money

shouldRun is the Start/Stop toggle, it lives in the definition, and therefore Git sync and deployment pipelines carry it. Deploy a workspace whose agents were left started and they start in the target.

Per capacity and billing:

• Operations agent compute — 0.46 CU-hours per hour, continuously, per running agent. Not per firing, not per alert. Per hour, while shouldRun is true.
• Reasoning meters bill on top per condition met, and monitored data sits in OneLake for 30 days. Full table in the reference file.
• It is all background usage, throttled only after the capacity is over its limits for 24 hours — at which point background tasks are rejected and the agent's processing halts. A silent stop.

Check shouldRun in every diff. A true merged to main is a standing meter in whatever workspace syncs it.

6. Serializer artifacts that are not corruption

A committed Configurations.json does not validate against its own schema. There are two independent reasons, and the first applies to every such file:

• The $schema key is itself a violation. The root declares exactly configuration, playbook and shouldRun with additionalProperties: false, and $schema is not among them — yet Fabric writes $schema as the file's first key. So the document Fabric emits is rejected by the document Fabric publishes to describe it. Checked against the live schema with jsonschema 2026-09-02.
• playbook may be absent even though it is required. Observed on an agent created but never given Generate Playbook, so the portal probably omits it until one is generated — but required may simply not be enforced on write. Single sample; determine which.

So do not put a bare schema validation in CI and read its failure as corruption. Strip $schema before validating, and decide separately what an absent playbook means for you.

The rest are from that same single agent. Treat them as observations, not contracts, and reproduce against a configured agent before depending on any of them. Observed 2026-09-02.

• messageDestination can carry a duplicate "kind" key. Harmless on parse (last wins) and not a post-parse schema violation, but the file is non-canonical and it is a diff-noise and idempotency risk on round-trip.

• An action parameter has no value field, and what description actually does is unresolved. parameter is {name, description} with additionalProperties: false — there is nowhere to put a value. Yet in the sample every name matches a parameter on the target pipeline and every description is that parameter's defaultValue rendered as a string ({"name": "DryRun", "description": "false"}, {"name": "LocalTimeZoneId", "description": "Eastern Standard Time"}).

  That observation does not discriminate between the two readings, because both predict it: either description is the value slot and the portal seeded it from the target's defaults, or it is prose that guides the LLM in choosing a value at invocation time and the portal seeded it from the same place. The docs lean to the second — parameters are "passed when it invokes the action", and the approver is told to "adjust any action parameters if needed" in Teams, which is a runtime affordance rather than a file one.

  So do not hand-edit a description expecting it to pin a value. Resolve it first by running the action and reading what the target actually received. Unresolved as of 2026-09-02.

• dataSources[].workspaceId may be all-zeros (00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000) while id is a real identifier. Reads as a "current workspace" sentinel; unconfirmed.

7. Which agent item do I want

Activator is the third option and is not an LLM — use it for deterministic rule-based alerting. It also appears inside this item: a PowerAutomateAction stores its connection in an Activator item.

The agent runs as its creator, permanently. Approving a recommendation executes the action with the creator's permissions, and changing the message recipient does not change whose credentials are used — while recipients need only write on the agent item. A shared-recipient agent is a privilege-escalation surface; name it in review.

8. Tooling reach

fab 1.7.0 knows OperationsAgent in fabric_cli/commands/find/type_supported.yaml, but the name is absent from the ItemType enum in fabric_cli/core/fab_types.py. So fab find can locate one and fab cannot create or address it — the same split fabric-graph documents for GraphModel.

9. Constraints

• Everything here is preview — the item, its Git integration, its deployment-pipeline support, and Investigator insights. Two doc trees describing one item is itself a sign the surface has not settled. Register nothing as GA.
• Don't hand-craft the item folder. Create it in the portal and commit what Fabric writes; hand-edit Configurations.json afterwards.
• Don't validate a committed file against the schema in CI as-is. It will fail on the $schema key Fabric wrote, and may fail again on an absent playbook (§6).
• Don't rely on the variable reference in dataSources until it has been round-tripped — the schema permits it and the docs do not acknowledge it (§4).
• Choose the Eventhouse or ontology against the agent's limits, not after. Regular tables only, ontology in the same workspace, no AND conditions on an ontology — none is workaroundable later, and all are in the reference file.
• Check availability before promising it. Not on trial capacities, Azure public cloud only with two US regions excluded, no sovereign clouds, not in CMK-encrypted workspaces, English only. Exact list in the reference file.

Behavioural detail — the eight state/transition conditions, instruction authoring shape, the full billing table, availability and region exclusions, Investigator insights, and the three action-configuration paths — is in references/REFERENCE.md.