Licensing Advent Calendar – Day 4 – PPAC User License Consumption

Day 4 of the Advent Calendar. It is time to talk about the first license report available for the required user licensing. On this day, I will only talk about the basic visualization of the licensing report available in Power Platform Admin Center.

User License Consumption

The calculation for required licenses has been moved out of Dynamics 365 F&O and is now a microservice that uses licensing metadata per securable object and compares this with the actual security roles per environment. This results in a list of license SKUs that are possible as a single license or multiple roles required if a security role consists of objects from different Dynamics 365 products, as listed in yesterday’s post about Dynamics 365 Licensing. It will then also check which users are assigned to the roles. By combining this information, the required licenses per user can be presented on the licensing report.

The report is available in the Power Platform Admin Center. You can open it by opening the Power Platform Admin Center and browsing to Licensing, and then clicking Finance and Operations. You can also use the next URL directly: https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/billing/licenses/financeAndOperations

You need to be a Global Administrator or have the Dynamics 365 Administrator or Power Platform Administrator role assigned to your user account in Entra ID. Without administrative permissions, the report is not available.

In this report, you can read whether you are compliant with the assigned licenses to users. The top of the report starts with 5 tiles, where the first three will be discussed in this post, leaving the others for another Advent day.

The counts on the report are showing numbers from all of your production environments in your tenant. In case you have multiple environments due to regional deployments, this report summarizes them all. In case a user is an accountant in one environment and a project manager in another production environment, the report will correctly list two required licenses: Finance and Project Operations.

The first tile shows the number of users in the environment who actually need a license. The second tile is important to be aware of. This is about the users without any Dynamics 365 F&O license assigned. This count should be zero before your tenant will be subject to the license enforcement to avoid denying access to the application. When this will happen in your tenant is explained here: Licensing Advent Calendar – Day 2 – Staged timelines. Not listed as part of the unlicensed users are the users that do have a license, but are under-licensed. They need a higher license SKU or an additional Attach license.

Each of these tiles does have a link called View details. When you click on this, you get a list of users per environment with the details of what licenses are required, already assigned, and missing.

You can follow the link and start assigning licenses, but before doing that, I recommend continuing to read and see if you can save on required licenses.

Below the top tiles, you can see a breakdown per License SKU. As there are different licenses possible per product, you will see, e.g., only Finance and not whether this should be a base, premium, or attach license. What exact SKU will be assigned requires a human decision.

Report validation

Hold your horses… Don’t start assigning and acquiring new licenses directly. You should first validate the outcome with your expectations. E.g., in this example, I might not have expected Commerce licenses. Maybe you have a lot of timesheet writers who are now reported with a missing base license. There is a reason why the report shows the numbers. You should understand why. This year, my colleagues and I performed a lot of licensing assessments at clients, and the unexpected numbers are usually explained by a wrong (several times a poor) security implementation. E.g., in many cases I have seen security roles that are intended as Team members or Operations-Activity were reported to require, e.g., 2 or more product licenses. You don’t need, e.g., a Project Operations license for your timesheet writers. In case you have a lot of these users, the requirement for too many full licenses can raise the license costs to an extremely high amount. E.g., with one of my assessments, if the roles are not cleaned in a proper way, they should acquire for about $ 2 million additional licenses. This is on top of what they have as contract and expectations today.

I also have to admit that in several cases, the underlying metadata had issues, causing incorrect license reporting. E.g., a lot of complaints were about the approval of vendor invoices or other similar tasks that were not recognized as being a Team member. Also, for the same reason, e.g., the Commerce or Human Resources license was required.

While digging into the details, I was able to suggest role changes or change the roles myself. In addition, if it was due to a bug, I reported it to Microsoft if it was not a known issue yet. Various times, I had seen issues that were solved the next day, before I could even write a message to Microsoft.

By analyzing the security role contents, but also looking at what users had what duties, there are opportunities to move particular tasks to other users, bringing the license requirements for security roles with a lot of users assigned lower.

I will continue to explain details in the coming days.

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!