Introduction
A connection is not a one-off import. It keeps looking, on a schedule you set, and each sweep can either hand you a list to review or put new agents straight into the registry. Those are two different postures, and the choice between them is the single setting on this page that matters.
Where to find it
AI Governance > Discovery > open a connection > the gear icon in the header. Both settings live in one Settings modal.
Settings and Sync Now stay visible during the first sweep; the button reads Syncing… while any sweep runs.
The two settings
Setting | Options | Default | What it decides |
Sync interval |
|
| How often the connection re-reads the source |
Auto-register agents | On / Off | Off | Whether a newly discovered agent enters the registry by itself |
The toggle's own description is the shortest accurate summary of it: "Add newly discovered agents to the registry automatically."
Choosing a cadence
Cadence is a cost-of-lateness question, not a performance one. A sweep is cheap; what you are deciding is how long an agent can exist in a connected platform before your registry knows about it.
Every hour — for platforms where anyone can create an agent — Self-serve builder surfaces produce agents on no schedule at all. An hour is a tolerable blind window; a week is not.
Daily — for platforms with a release process — If agents arrive through a deployment, discovery only needs to keep pace with deployments.
Weekly — for stable or archival sources — A connection you keep for completeness rather than change.
Note: Cadence does not affect trace ingestion. It governs how often UnifyApps looks for new assets. Traces pulled through a connection are ingested on their own schedule — every 15 minutes, dropping to hourly after three failed attempts — independent of the sweep cadence.
Auto-register, and what it costs you
With auto-register off, nothing enters the registry until you act. A banner — "N assets discovered", with Register All and Dismiss — shows only while every asset on the connection is still unregistered; once you register any one of them, it no longer appears. With auto-register on, the sweep registers new assets for you.
Auto-register also applies to models (OpenAI, Core42 Compass). With it off, every discovered agent and model arrives Excluded until you register it.
The trade is between two failure modes, and neither is universally better:
Auto-register off | Auto-register on | |
Failure mode | An agent runs ungoverned while it sits in the banner | The registry fills with assets nobody chose |
Registry reflects | What your team has decided to govern | What the source platform contains |
Effort | A recurring review | A recurring clean-up |
Suits | A source with a long tail of experiments | A source where everything is production by definition |
"Auto-register is not a shortcut past the review. It moves the review from before registration to after it."
Registering is still an act, even when it is automatic
Discovery finding an agent and the registry governing it remain two separate things — see Working with Discovered Agents. Auto-register performs the second act on your behalf; it does not merge them. A registered agent can still be excluded afterwards with the per-row Register toggle on the connection.
Sync Now
Sync Now runs a sweep immediately without changing the schedule. Use it after you have created something in the source platform and do not want to wait out the interval — verifying a new connection's permissions, most often.
If a sweep fails, the connection's status becomes Sync Error and the page is replaced by a "Sync failed" panel with the error from the platform and a Try again button. ("Couldn't start the sync" appears only if the sync automation itself is not configured.)
The first sync
A newly added connection runs an initial sweep before it can do anything else. While that is running the detail page shows "Initial sync in progress" — "{connection} is being synced for the first time. This can take a while for large sources.". Settings and Sync Now stay available while it runs.
You can change the cadence at any time — including during the first sweep. Open Settings on the connection page and set the interval you want.
The page polls the connection every few seconds and swaps itself out when the sweep lands. A connection that hits a sync error leaves this state deliberately, so the page does not spin — or hide its own settings — indefinitely.
If a sweep finds nothing new
Symptom | Most likely cause |
An agent exists in the source but never appears | The credential's scope does not cover it. Discovery can only see what its connection is permitted to read. |
The banner does not appear | It shows only while every asset on the connection is unregistered, and |
Nothing arrives at the expected time | Confirm the interval saved; then |