AI agents running in production create unique infrastructure challenges that standard LLM monitoring can't address — multi-step runs, multi-provider calls, compounding faults, and runaway token spend. An agent gateway is a dedicated infrastructure layer sitting between agents and everything they call (LLM providers, MCP tool servers, sub-agents), centralizing routing, credential management, access control, guardrails, cost enforcement, and full-chain observability. Unlike a basic LLM gateway that treats each call as an independent transaction, an agent gateway understands sequences and traces entire runs under a single identifier. Portkey implements this through three products: an AI Gateway for LLM routing and reliability, an MCP Gateway for tool-call proxying and access control, and an Agent Gateway for agent-to-agent traffic via the A2A protocol.
Table of contents
Why agent traffic isn’t just LLM trafficWhat an AI agent gateway actually isSix production problems an agent gateway solvesHow Portkey delivers this in productionFAQsSort: