Databricks Omnigent part 2: policies, budgets, and Unity Gateway for agents
matei_zaharia · x · 2026-10-20
Databricks engineers Julia Førde and Zoë Van Noppen published part 2 of the Omnigent series, tackling the two practical questions of running agents: what they're allowed to do, and how much they spend.
- Origin: many Databricks engineers built personal multi-harness workflows that couldn't be shared, compounded by cost overruns and security concerns
- Stateful policies: per-tool-call DENY/ASK/ALLOW decisions — e.g. deny reading .env on sensitive-content detection, deny before git commit
- Budgets and cost views: session and user-period budgets, per-model cost breakdowns, most-costly-session monitoring
- Smart routing and Unity Gateway for unified traffic control
A solid open-source reference for agent governance (permissions + cost).
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