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.
