Environments
In watsonx Orchestrate, the draft and live environments give you control over how you build, test, and deploy your agents.
Use the draft environment to develop and validate your agent's behavior, test its tools and connections, and experiment safely without affecting production. When your agent is ready for real users, deploy it to the live environment, where it becomes available for use across your organization.
You can manage an agent and its components such as tools, connections, behaviors, and knowledge from the agent's configuration page within the Build agents and tools page. Agent cards clearly indicate deployment status: agents running in production display a Live label, while agents still in development appear without a label.
Draft environment
The draft environment contains all in-progress work while you configure your agent by using components such as collaborator agents, tools, knowledge, behavior, and voice. Everything that you do in the draft stays internal and is not exposed to users in production.
When an agent is in the draft environment, you can:
Add and modify components.
Test the functions by using the Preview chat.
Use supported components through configured channels, except the chat home page.
Draft is your safe space to experiment without affecting production agents.
Live environment
The live environment is the polished, production-ready version of your agent. When you deploy an agent to live, it becomes available to users through all configured channels. Live represents the current production state of your agent with all components that are exposed to users.
For detailed deployment instructions, including pre-deployment checks, connection configuration, and validation steps, see Deploying agents.
Knowledge does not distinguish between draft and live environments. Any updates that you make to an existing knowledge base immediately affect both draft and live agents.
Managing agent versions
An agent version is a snapshot of an agent at a specific point in time, which captures the current state of all included artifacts. Changes to those artifacts might not affect existing versions.
For detailed information about agent versioning, see Working with agent and tool versions.