Important
Check out the msignite2025-v1.0 release tag to see the exact version of this lab that was delivered at Microsoft Ignite 2025. The main line may be getting a refresh soon to reflect the latest changes and feature updates from Microsoft Ignite.
This hands-on workshop will provide participants with the skills to effectively manage, govern, and scale agentic AI applications using Azure and Azure AI Foundry. The session will cover observability capabilities, model management policies, agent functionalities, and governance strategies. Participants will engage in practical exercises to apply these concepts in real-world scenarios.
- Level: 300-400
- Duration: 4 hours
Imagine this. You are an AI engineer at Zava, an enterprise retail store specializing in home improvement goods for DIY enthusiasts. Your team is building Cora, a shopping assistant AI to answer customer queries in-store and online. You have three requirements:
- The solution must reflect the Zava brand with a custom tone & style
- It should be cost-effective to deploy given the simple, narrow task
- It should support end-to-end observability to ensure trustworthy AI
By the end of this session, you will be able to
- Build and deploy an agentic AI retail chatbot on Azure AI Foundry
- Evaluate the quality, safety & agentic efficacy of chatbot operation
- Fine-Tune the chatbot model to customize tone & style of response
- Distill chatbot behavior to a smaller model for cost-effective operation
- Trace and monitor chatbot operations to detect & debug performance issues
- Understand how Azure AI Foundry enables end-to-end observability for AI
- Azure AI Foundry - Platform for building and deploying enterprise AI applications
- Azure AI Agent Service - Managed service for production AI agents with tool orchestration
- Azure AI Search - Semantic and vector search for grounding agent responses
- Azure AI Evaluation SDK - SDK for evaluating AI quality, safety, and agent performance
- Azure Application Insights - Performance monitoring with distributed tracing
- Microsoft Agent Framework - SDK for custom multi-agent orchestration
- OpenTelemetry - Observability framework for tracing AI operations
| Resources | Links | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Ignite 2025 Next Steps | https://aka.ms/Ignite25-Next-Steps | Links to all repos for Ignite 2025 Sessions |
| Microsoft Foundry Community Discord | Connect with the Microsoft Foundry Community! | |
| Learn at Ignite | https://aka.ms/LearnAtIgnite | Continue learning on Microsoft Learn |
 Nitya Narasimhan 📢 |  Bethany Jepchumba 📢 |
This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit Contributor License Agreements.
When you submit a pull request, a CLA bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., status check, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.
This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.
This project may contain trademarks or logos for projects, products, or services. Authorized use of Microsoft trademarks or logos is subject to and must follow Microsoft's Trademark & Brand Guidelines. Use of Microsoft trademarks or logos in modified versions of this project must not cause confusion or imply Microsoft sponsorship. Any use of third-party trademarks or logos are subject to those third-party's policies.