Buried in that tidal wave was news of something called Entra Agent ID, the main idea of which is to use Microsoft Entra to govern AI agents in the same way that Entra currently governs human users; that is, to give each agent a unique, managed identity and apply familiar Entra identity controls such as conditional access, identity governance, and identity protection. Entra is Microsoft's cloud-based identity access management (IAM) solution.
As organizations embrace AI agents, they face a rapidly fragmenting landscape. Every SaaS-application is embedding agents, cloudproviders are building agents, partners are building agents, and internal teams are developing their own agentic solutions. This creates new challenges: how do you manage, secure, and observe all these agents working together? How do you keep a clear overview?
However, Starburst rivals, such as Databricks and Snowflake, offer agent governance features with Unity Catalog and Horizon, respectively. Analysts point out that the agent usage tracking features added to Startburst are not only important for controlling over-expenditure but are also becoming table stakes across data lakehouses. While Databricks' Mosaic AI Gateway offers rate limits, usage tracking, and inference logs and tables, with cost monitoring through system tables, Snowflake's Cortex AI Observability offers tracing, evaluations, and cost and usage analysis, along with community-built cost dashboards.
