Microsoft Foundry

# Microsoft Foundry Skill

This skill helps developers work with Microsoft Foundry resources, covering model discovery and deployment, complete dev lifecycle of AI agent, evaluation workflows, and troubleshooting.

## Pre-Execution Requirements

> **MANDATORY: Before executing ANY workflow, you MUST first call the Azure MCP `foundry` tool and inspect the available Foundry MCP tools and related parameters.** Treat this initial `foundry` call as a discovery/help step. For this skill, Azure MCP `foundry` is the required entry point for Foundry-related MCP operations.

## Sub-Skills

> **MANDATORY: Before executing ANY workflow-specific steps, you MUST read the corresponding sub-skill document.** Do not call workflow-specific MCP tools for a workflow without reading its skill document. This applies even if you already know the MCP tool parameters — the skill document contains required workflow steps, pre-checks, and validation logic that must be followed. This rule applies on every new user message that triggers a different workflow, even if the skill is already loaded.

This skill includes specialized sub-skills for specific workflows. **Use these instead of the main skill when they match your task:**

| Sub-Skill | When to Use | Reference |
|-----------|-------------|-----------|
| **deploy** | Containerize, build, push to ACR, create/update/clone agent deployments | [deploy](foundry-agent/deploy/deploy.md) |
| **invoke** | Send messages to an agent, single or multi-turn conversations | [invoke](foundry-agent/invoke/invoke.md) |
| **observe** | Evaluate agent quality, run batch evals, analyze failures, optimize prompts, improve agent instructions, compare versions, set up CI/CD monitoring, and enable continuous production evaluation | [observe](foundry-agent/observe/observe.md) |
| **trace** | Query traces, analyze latency/failures, correlate eval results to specific responses via App Insights `customEvents` | [trace](foundry-agent/trace/trace.md) |
| **troubleshoot** | View hosted agent logs, query telemetry, diagnose failures | [troubleshoot](foundry-agent/troubleshoot/troubleshoot.md) |
| **create** | Create new hosted agent applications. Supports Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, or custom frameworks in Python or C#, across `responses` or `invocations` protocols. | [create](foundry-agent/create/create-hosted.md) |
| **faos-optimize** | Convert existing Python agent code to a FAOS (Foundry Agent Optimization Service) optimization-ready version by wiring evaluator-targeted instructions/model/temperature knobs, then stop for review before deployment. | [faos-optimize](foundry-agent/faos-optimize/faos-optimize.md) |
| **eval-datasets** | Harvest production traces into evaluation datasets, manage dataset versions and splits, track evaluation metrics over time, detect regressions, and maintain full lineage from trace to de