Not working: using an agent with a toolbox and a skill

[holo-scott]

Hi,

I've deployed a model and have created an agent for it. I've programmatically created a skill and put it in a toolbox. I've created a project connection for the toolbox with the Azure CLI and linked the toolbox to the agent. I've gotten all these components to show up in the Foundry Portal as expected. However, I'm having trouble getting the agent to use the skill or to even want to search for tools.

In the portal, under 'Tools', I've updated the toolbox connection configuration to include the names of the tool_search and skill tools that I include in the toolbox. After that, on one occasion when I prompted the agent I managed to have the agent begin to look for tools (and I could see in the trace it called tool_search). That has been the exception, though.
I have also tried changing the parameters for the model on the agent (in Foundry Portal) so that 'Choose when to use tools' is set to 'Always use'. However, whenever I do this, the agent breaks - I get the following error message for any simple prompt I supply:

"The server had an error processing your request. Sorry about that! You can retry your request, or contact us through an Azure support request at: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2213926 if you keep seeing this error. (Please include the request ID 841ade7d-d981-4c08-b66b-e01c1a17c28f in your email.)"

I wanted to see whether anyone knows what I need to try to get the agent to check its available skills and tools (and use the skill)?

I suspect any of these things might be issues in my approach so far, but I haven't yet had a chance to try them:

• I haven't tried increasing the Reasoning Effort above low yet.
• I'm using toolbox_search_preview rather than toolbox_search (just a hangover from a code snippet in the docs, maybe I should move onto vanilla toolbox_search?)

As I'm using the Java SDK, I have tried with and without using allowPreview() in the AgentsClientBuilder and AIProjectClientBuilder classes, when creating toolboxes and skills respectively.

Another thing: I noticed that the AI chatbot in the Foundry portal disappeared in recent days. There used to be a button next to the search bar, but it's gone and I don't see it anywhere else.

Thank you in advance.