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title: Agents & Routing
description: How to create and manage AI Agents within Alephant
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Agents represent the applications or services consuming AI models through Alephant. By creating an Agent, you generate an isolated Virtual Key (VK) for that specific use case.

## Creating an Agent

When you create an Agent, you define:

1. **Basic Info:** Name and description of the application.
2. **Configuration:** The desired LLM provider, target model, and environment (e.g., production, staging).
3. **Routing:** The underlying Master Key (Provider Key) to process the requests.

Upon creation, Alephant automatically generates a Virtual Key bound to this Agent.

## Agent Observability

Agent metrics (request volume, latency, cost, tokens) are deeply tracked in the dashboard. While the Agent count itself does not affect your subscription billing, tracking per-Agent performance is crucial for optimization and identifying anomalies (like latency spikes or abnormal costs).

## Smart Routing

With Alephant, you can implement smart routing policies (on supported plans) to configure fallback models. If a primary provider experiences downtime, the gateway can seamlessly route traffic to a secondary provider without any code changes on your end.