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Entra ID and Microsoft 365 Offer Different License Insights
On April 22, the Entra ID team announced the availability of License Usage Insights, new information presented in the Entra admin center to help tenants “track adoption of core identity protections and uncover potential gaps in your security coverage.” After the motherhood and apple pie of the marketing prouncement, we learn that license usage insights are also intended to help tenants understand when they need more Entra premium licenses.
The Microsoft 365 admin center has a new dashboard view. One of the cards reveals license information. It would be nice if Microsoft took a consistent and effective approach to reporting license details, but they don’t. Let’s look at what happens.
Entra License Insights
The Entra team is very big into delivering insights, and the license usage insights follow on from the preview of group insights delivered recently. It’s good that Microsoft goes to the effort of generating insights for tenants. Figure 1 shows the data for my (small) tenant, accessed through the Licenses section of the Entra admin center.
The first insight shows that the tenant has ten Entra P1 and ten Entra P2 licenses. These licenses are both included in Microsoft 365 E5. The right-hand side graph tracks usage patterns over the last six months and reports a peak of 12 users of conditional access policies. Some of the users without Microsoft 365 E5 have obviously used conditional access. According to this data, I “owe” Microsoft for two Entra P1 licenses.
The graph has a section for guest users, who might be forced to use conditional access to access the tenant. Guest accounts should be licensed on a monthly active user basis (MAU), and Microsoft makes the first 50,000 MAU free of charge.
The left-hand graphic offers a feature usage report. I learned here that 1 license was being used for risk-based conditional access, but without the ability to click-through to see the details of the account, the insight leaves it to the tenant to find out who this might be. The lack of an option to download details behind the insights is also regrettable.
Reporting Licenses in Microsoft 365
It’s reasonable that the Entra admin center should only report insights for Entra licenses. The new dashboard card for licenses in the Microsoft 365 admin center focuses on Microsoft 365 licenses but offers some odd results. As you can see from Figure 2, the card says that my tenant has 61 users. That’s just plain wrong. It seems like the figure includes the unlicensed user accounts created for purposes like Exchange Online shared and room mailboxes and accounts synchronized from other tenants in a multi-tenant organization.
Entra ID only supports user and guest accounts. It offers no way to identify utility accounts or accounts synchronized into a tenant that are licensed in another tenant. This flaw has been highlighted to Microsoft many times, but they have chosen not to introduce additional granularity for accounts.
The card also reports that 20 Microsoft 365 licenses are available but ignores other common licenses used by the tenant such as Office 365 E3. In fact, I don’t know how the admin center comes up with 20 Microsoft 365 licenses because only ten Microsoft 365 E5 licenses are available. Even adding the five Office 365 E5 licenses to the ten Microsoft 365 E5 licenses doesn’t result in 20.
License Management is a Well-Worn Road
It’s disappointing to see that information presented by the Microsoft 365 admin center is so obviously wrong. The Graph APIs for licenses are not an unknown secret (anyone can use the APIs to produce their own reports) and many people have created comprehensive license reporting scripts.
It would be nice if the Entra and Microsoft 365 admin teams took notice of what’s been done in the real world to generate valuable insights rather than the simplistic views they currently present.
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Thanks for bring it up. I see that licenses across Entra, Viva Insights dashboard, Adoption score, M365 admin reports, Power BI M365 App template, etc all needs to be combined under one place with different roles (like administrators, cost managers, business leaders). It is so confusing to get different reports from different places.