Joule & A2A
The SAP Operation Monitoring Assistant is an A2A agent: it speaks the open Agent2Agent protocol, so SAP Joule, Microsoft Copilot Studio or any other A2A client can talk to it. In SAP Joule it plugs in as a code-based agent, what SAP calls Bring Your Own Agent.
A2A in short
A2A (Agent2Agent) is an open protocol that lets agents call each other, whatever they are built with. The assistant publishes an agent card: its name, what it does, its skills with example prompts, and how callers sign in. A client reads the card, sends a question, and gets the answer back as formatted text, plus structured data and, for presentations, a download link.
Work that takes longer, such as a restart running in SAP, is reported back later with A2A push notifications, so the chat does not have to wait for it.
In SAP Joule
Setting it up takes three steps:
- Deploy the assistant with Boidra Platform. The deployment also creates the SAP BTP destination Joule uses to reach it. See Create, register & deploy an agent.
- Deploy the Joule capability that ships with the assistant.
- Ask in Joule. Try the prompts in Skills & example prompts.
Two scenarios, one conversation
Joule routes each question to one of two scenarios. Both talk to the same assistant and continue the same conversation, so "restart it" after a resolution knows which message you mean.
| Scenario | Handles | How the answer arrives |
|---|---|---|
| Questions | The morning briefing and today's errors, resolutions and known solutions, error lists, health, interfaces and their configuration, landscape questions, presentations, and cancels with their reason and approval | In the same response |
| Restarts | Restart requests, your approval, the status of a restart | Joule shows "Restart started" at once and the result when SAP has finished |
What you see in Joule
- Formatted answers: a title, the key facts, tables, numbered steps and a Next suggestion.
- Charts: a health or statistics answer shows the errors per interface over time.
- Quick reply buttons when a question has fixed choices, such as PowerPoint / PDF or Yes, restart / No.
- Download links for presentations and landscape documents.
Charts, cards and quick reply buttons come with the setting Joule view set to ui5; with markdown, the default, Joule shows the formatted text. See Settings.
Read the walkthrough
How Joule calls an A2A agent end to end (agent card, BTP destination, Joule function) is shown on the blog: Connect any agent to SAP Joule with A2A.
In Microsoft Copilot Studio and other A2A clients
- Copilot Studio: add the assistant as an A2A agent with OAuth 2.0 sign-in. Each user signs in once with your SAP BTP identity provider; Copilot keeps the session.
- Other A2A clients and agents: call the assistant's endpoint with a token from your SAP BTP subaccount.
The answers are the same everywhere. Clients without Joule's charts and buttons get the same content as text, with numbered choices to reply to.
Security and audit
- Every call is signed in. The assistant accepts only tokens from your SAP BTP subaccount (SAP BTP XSUAA, or SAP Cloud Identity Services for Joule's user tokens).
- It knows who asked. A restart or a cancel is recorded with the name of the user who approved it and a correlation ID that follows the request from Joule into SAP.
- It only reaches what you assign. The assistant reads SAP through the SAP operations platform endpoints an administrator assigns to it. See Settings.