Licensing Advent Calendar – Day 19 – Export to CSV

Door 19 unlocked. On this day, you will learn the option to export the license report to CSV. Read about what you can do with the exported data.

Export to CSV

When you go to the User License Consumption reports available in PPAC and LCS, there are some features I haven’t highlighted yet. One of the features is the option to export the license report data to CSV. On the first page, you will find a button with the label Export to CSV.

Click on the button to open a dialog page where you can choose between a standard or detailed report type. I will explain the differences below in this post.

When you select one of the options, you can change the proposed file name and click on Start.

The report is not directly available. It is creating the export in the background, which will take several minutes. In the meantime, you can either choose to wait or close the dialog and come back later.

Once the report is available. you can either click on the Download button or the file link. This will download the reports. You can create a new export once the licensing data is refreshed. The refresh is between 4 and 12 hours. In my experience, this is currently about 4 times a day, every 6 hours.

Standard report

The CSV files can be opened in e.g., Microsoft Excel, or you can import it in another system. The report contains the next columns:

• TenantId
• UserEmail
• UserId
• RequiredLicense(s)
• AssignedLicense(s)
• MissingLicense(s)
• RefreshedOn

The data shown in this standard report is only user license data related to your production environment. It can be used as an action list to check which users have missing licenses and should be assigned. In case the UserEmail is not provided, the users can be deleted from Entra ID, or it is an Entra ID group. I will create another post about invalid users and the Entra ID groups.

Detailed report

The detailed report has other columns and data coming from both the production environment and sandboxes.

• TenantId
• EnvironmentId
• EnvironmentName
• EnvironmentType
• UserEmail
• UserId
• SecurityRole
• RequiredLicense
• AssignedLicense(s)
• RefreshedOn

With this detailed report, you can do a lot more compared to the standard report. The report is having a record per assigned security role and license SKU, but you will need to sort it by User, EnvironmentType, and SecurityRole to have data grouped.

As mentioned before, the license enforcement does not apply to sandboxes and development environments. For distinction and clarification, the column RequiredLicense starts with Not applicable if the environment type is not production.

With this report, you can create, e.g., a user/role matrix, a user/license matrix, or create a report with the license requirements per security role. As this export has data from sandboxes, you can use it in case an organization does not have a production environment yet. Note that disabled users in the sandbox (or production environment) are excluded from the licensing reports. You can also use it for many more purposes. I used it mainly to generate overviews to discuss recommendations with clients, to know what to focus on to possibly lower the overall license requirements per role or per user.

There is more…

During the Advent period, each day in December, I will share some thoughts and tips related to the Dynamics 365 user license enforcement. If you have questions about this topic, feel free to contact me via LinkedIn, the comments section below, or the contact form on this blog. I will then either update one of the planned blogs for the coming 24 days or answer questions in a new post.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Enforcement Advent Calendar

I do hope you liked this post and will add value for you in your daily work as a professional. If you have related questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the Comment feature below.


That’s all for now. Till next time!