What is Microsoft Foundry Control Plane?
Microsoft Foundry Control Plane is a unified management interface that provides visibility, governance, and control over AI agents, models, and tools across an entire Foundry environment. You reach Foundry Control Plane through the Operate button in the Foundry portal (ai.azure.com), where you get cross-project, fleet-wide visibility into all AI assets within a subscription or tenant context. The interface is organized into the panes Overview, Assets, Compliance, Quota, and Admin.
Without Foundry Control Plane, teams manage agents, models, and compliance through individual Azure portal blades and separate per-project views. Foundry Control Plane solves this by consolidating inventory, observability, compliance, and security into one role-aware interface. This lets governance scale from a single copilot to autonomous multi-agent fleets that span first-party Foundry and Microsoft agents as well as external, non-Microsoft agents.
Core Features
- Fleet-wide visibility and inventory: The Assets pane shows a searchable table of all agents, models, and tools across projects, with filters by version, tags, health score, cost, alerts, and token usage.
- Compliance and guardrails: Define and enforce enterprise-wide policies through Azure Policy, Defender, and Purview. Versioned policies, auditability, and bulk remediation correct noncompliant configurations across the fleet.
- Observability and performance: Continuous evaluation of quality and risk dimensions such as task adherence, intent resolution, groundedness, sensitive-data leakage, and exposure to jailbreak and cross-domain prompt injection attacks (XPIAs).
- Security and identity: Scheduled automated red-teaming through the AI Red Teaming Agent, drift monitoring, cluster analysis for root-cause discovery, and identity and access control via Microsoft Entra.
Typical Use Cases
Manage a multi-agent fleet: Platform teams track key metrics such as active agents, run completion rate, compliance posture, and cost trends in the Overview pane. They drill into anomalies or cost spikes through contextual charts that link directly to inventory, observability, or policy information.
Enforce compliance: Governance teams define guardrail policies for safety, compliance, and quality, assign them with versioning, and monitor compliance posture in real time. Noncompliant assets become visible and can be corrected through bulk remediation.
Secure agents: Security teams schedule automated red-teaming scans, monitor drift, and view Defender and Purview alerts directly on the Foundry Control Plane dashboard. Rate limits, token usage, and cost anomalies are tracked to prevent inefficiency and abuse.
Benefits
- Cross-project visibility into the entire AI agent fleet in one interface
- Consistent governance across first-party and external agents via Defender, Purview, Azure Policy, and Entra
- Early detection of risk, drift, and cost anomalies through continuous evaluation and monitoring
Integration with innFactory
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory supports you with the adoption and operation of this service.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Microsoft Foundry Control Plane?
Foundry Control Plane is the central management interface in Microsoft Foundry for AI agents, models, and tools. You reach it through the Operate button in the Foundry portal and get cross-project visibility into inventory, observability, compliance, and security. The capability is in public preview.
When should I use Microsoft Foundry Control Plane?
Use Foundry Control Plane when you run multiple AI agents across different projects or teams, require centralized compliance visibility and policy enforcement, integrate Defender and Purview for AI governance, or need to track cost and token usage across your entire AI environment.
How much does Microsoft Foundry Control Plane cost?
There is no separate fee for Foundry Control Plane itself. You pay consumption-based for the underlying resources: the AI gateway built on Azure API Management, model tokens, and the evaluations you run. No SLA applies during the public preview.
Which Microsoft services does Foundry Control Plane integrate for governance and security?
Foundry Control Plane integrates Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview (alerts surface directly on the dashboard), Azure Policy for versioned guardrail policies, and Microsoft Entra for identity and access control. Advanced governance features require a configured AI gateway.
