Licensing Advent Calendar – Day 22 – Invalid users

On the licensing reports in Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) and Lifecycle Services (LCS), you might see users appearing with a GUID instead of an email. Who are these users, and what will be your next step to clean up the GUID users?

GUID

When looking at users requiring a license, overall or for a specific license SKU, you might see users appearing with a GUID instead of an email. GUID stands for Globally Unique Identifier and is used in many applications to ensure unique keys. It consists of 32 hexadecimal numbers placed in groups. An example of a GUID is e2d436fe-3300-42c7-9c85-96d3ce07a343.

Usually, on the license reports in PPAC and LCS, the users are listed with their email addresses. In case a user shows up with a GUID, then the user is invalid.

How do you know which user is causing this? The user is available in one of your Dynamics 365 environments. It could even be a sandbox. You can go to the Users list page and search for the value between braces in the field Telemetry ID.

Invalid users

In case you have many users like this, you can go to the Invalid users page and refresh the data. There are various reasons why users show up as invalid, as I described earlier in a post about Invalid users in Dynamics 365 F&O.

Whereas the report in my environment shows only one user as a GUID, there can be more. In the example above, these users do have the same security roles, but only one is on the licensing reports. Let’s first talk about the root cause and then what to do to mitigate this issue.

You search for the users in Entra ID using the email or telemetry ID as listed in the screenshot above, via either the M365 Admin Center or Azure Portal. When doing this, you might not find a user, or the user is present, but is blocked from logging in. Both root causes are reported in Dynamics 365 F&O as the user not found in Entra ID. Anyway, when these users are not found in Entra ID, there is no impact if these users don’t have licenses assigned. This is not impacting other users.

Why is one user listed and the other not? The answer is about having the user active in Dynamics 365 or not.

Depending on your offboarding procedure, you can either delete the user or set the Enabled field to No. Then, after the report on PPAC and LCS is refreshed, the user disappears from the licensing report.

Anyway, it will be good to review all users to check if they are still employed or still need the access. Maybe you can disable more users or remove particular security roles.

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!