[Feature Request] Cross-instance agent handoff — Agent A hands off investigation to Agent B

[BabjiRishi]

Problem

Azure SRE Agent supports custom agent (sub-agent) handoffs within the same parent agent, but there is no native mechanism for cross-instance handoff — where Agent A (e.g., an ops orchestrator) hands off an investigation to Agent B (e.g., a product-specific agent) running as a separate Azure resource.

Current Behavior

• Custom agents within the same parent can hand off via handoff rules — this works well for domain specialization within a single agent
• Cross-instance handoff (Agent A → Agent B, where A and B are separate Microsoft.App/agents resources) is not supported
• Workaround: Agent A creates a work item with full context (evidence, KQL results, thread link), and the engineer manually opens a new thread on Agent B referencing the work item

Proposed Solution

1. Native cross-instance handoff API — Agent A invokes Agent B via a platform-managed handoff, passing context (thread summary, evidence, resource IDs, severity)
2. Shared investigation context — the receiving agent gets a structured context payload, not just a raw text dump
3. Bidirectional handoff — Agent B can hand back to Agent A with results (e.g., product agent completes RCA, hands result back to ops agent for mitigation)
4. Audit trail — both agents' threads link to each other for traceability

Use Case

In a multi-agent topology, a central operations agent detects issues across all products, while specialized product agents have deep domain knowledge and connected product repos. When the ops agent detects an exception burst in a specific product, it should hand off to the product-specific agent which has the relevant source code connected, product-specific skills, and architecture knowledge. Today this requires manual human intervention to bridge the two agents.

Impact

• High — critical for multi-agent topologies where specialization is distributed across agent instances
• Enables true agentic orchestration patterns (orchestrator + specialists)
• Reduces MTTR by eliminating the manual bridge between agents

Environment

• Azure SRE Agent (GA)