Clovie Concepts
Agents
An agent is any program that calls AI models on your behalf. Registering it gives it an owner, an environment and its own key.
In Clovie, an agent is any program that sends requests to an AI model: a customer-support bot, a coding assistant, a batch job that summarizes documents, or a script in a notebook. If it calls a model, it can be an agent.
Why register agents
Registering an agent turns an anonymous stream of API calls into something you can manage:
- Ownership. Each agent has an owner team and a contact, so you know who to ask about it.
- Its own key. Each agent calls the gateway with its own agent key. You can rotate or revoke one agent's access without touching any other agent.
- Policies and budgets. You can apply policies and budgets to one agent, to a team's agents or to every agent.
- Attribution. Every request and every cent of spend is recorded against the agent that made it.
What an agent record contains
When you register an agent in AI Governance → Agents → Registry, you give it:
- A Name, the only required field.
- An Environment: Production, Staging or Development.
- An Owner team and an Owner contact.
- Optionally a Framework, such as LangChain or CrewAI, and a Default model.
Clovie then creates an agent key for the agent and shows it once.
Agent status
An agent's status tells you where it is in its life:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Waiting for first call | Registered, but it has not sent a request yet. |
| Active | Sending requests through the gateway. |
| Disabled | Stopped. Its requests are rejected until someone re-enables it. |
| Archived | Retired. Kept for the audit trail, but it can no longer send requests. |
Agent keys
An agent key is the credential an agent uses to call the gateway. It is not your model provider's key: your provider keys stay in Clovie and never reach the agent. That means you can:
- Give each agent its own key, and see exactly which agent made each request.
- Rotate a key. The old key keeps working for 24 hours so you can deploy the new one.
- Revoke a key immediately if it leaks.
Stopping an agent
Every agent has a Kill switch. Turning it on rejects that agent's requests straight away, until someone re-enables it. In an emergency, an administrator can also stop every agent in the organization at once with Disable all agents.
Agents you have not registered yet
Some agents already call AI models without going through Clovie. AI Governance → Agents → Discovery finds agents in the cloud accounts and AI platforms you connect, and AI Governance → Agents → Shadow agents lists AI usage that did not come from a registered agent. From there you can register them. See Cloud connections.
Related
- Gateway: how an agent's requests reach the model.
- Policies: what an agent is allowed to do.
- Quickstart: register your first agent.