Introduction

An agent has three possible statuses, and none of them is stored on the record. Each is computed from something else — which is why you cannot set a status directly, and why one of the three is invisible in the registry.

The three statuses

Status	Means	Derived from	Visible in
`Active`	Registered, and telemetry has arrived	The agent is no longer awaiting its first traces	Everywhere
`Setup Pending`	Registered, but nothing has been received yet	The agent is still awaiting its first traces	Everywhere
`Excluded`	Discovered, and deliberately not governed	Registration is switched off	The connection detail page only

Setup Pending is about instrumentation, not about approval

A newly registered agent starts here and stays until its first trace lands. Nothing is waiting on a person — it is waiting on data.

While an agent is Setup Pending, its detail view opens on the Setup tab with the SDK steps for its platform. The page checks the record every few seconds and moves on by itself.

Note: The Setup tab disappears once traces arrive. It is there for exactly as long as it is useful. If you are looking for setup instructions on an agent that is already Active, the tab is gone — use Register an Agent Manually instead.

An agent that stays Setup Pending

Time alone does not move an agent out of this status — a trace does. If one has been sitting here, the question is always the same: is anything actually being sent?

Check	What it separates
Has the agent run at all since registration?	An idle agent from a broken pipeline
Is the exporter pointed at the endpoint on the `Setup` tab?	A wiring mistake from an auth one
Does the ingest key belong to this agent?	Traces arriving under a different record

Excluded, and why you cannot see it here

Excluded means someone looked at a discovered asset and decided not to govern it. The Agent Registry filters those rows out, so the status never renders in this list — it appears only on the detail page of the connection the asset came from.

This is the most common source of "the agent has disappeared". It has not; it is on its connection. See Review & Triage Discovered Assets.

What status does not tell you

Status describes the telemetry relationship and nothing else. In particular, Active does not mean governed, covered by a policy, or enforcing anything. An Active agent with no policy pointed at it is fully observed and entirely ungoverned.

Coverage is a separate question, answered by the Policies column and the agent's Policies tab. Enforcement is a third, answered by the connection type — see Connection Type & Control Mode.

How the first trace arrives depends on how the agent got here

Both routes end at the same status, and only one of them gives you something to do.

	Discovered through a connection	Registered manually
Traces arrive by	The connection	You instrumenting the agent
Your setup work	None	The `Setup` tab
`Setup Pending` means	It has not run yet	It is not instrumented, or has not run
To clear it	Wait for real usage	Instrument, then run it once

Note: The Setup tab appears for anything awaiting a first trace, however it was registered. So a discovered agent that has simply not run yet shows SDK and OTLP instructions that do not apply to it and that you cannot complete — you do not run the vendor's platform. Check how the agent got into the registry before working through that tab.

Agent Statuses