License consumption

Overview

License consumption is a document type in Azure Documenter that provides a detailed summary of Microsoft 365 licensing SKUs and their associated service plan inventories, showing how licenses are allocated, consumed, and utilized across the tenant.

The License consumption document shows how Microsoft 365 licenses are allocated, consumed, and utilized across the tenant.

Key insights:

• License allocation across users
• Usage and availability of licenses
• Service plan distribution within each SKU

Document structure:

• Tenant details — overview of the organization's tenant information
• Paid SKUs overview — lists each purchased SKU with its Purchased, Consumed, and Available unit counts, usage percentage, waste percentage, and a WasteStatus rating (Excellent, Good, Review, or High) with a WastePriority indicator to help prioritize reclamation
• SKU details — detailed breakdown of each SKU, including assigned user counts and the number of service plans included in that SKU
• Paid SKUs (Free tier) — free-tier licenses associated with paid subscriptions, such as Power BI Free and Copilot Studio Viral Trial, with their Purchased and Consumed counts
• Trial / Free SKUs — trial and free licenses active in the tenant, including any licenses with negative available units resulting from overassignment
• Service plan inventories — maps each service plan to the SKUs that include it, showing total Purchased, Used, and Available units per plan and the list of SKUs it belongs to
• Waste overview — highlights licenses with underutilized or unused units, grouped by WasteStatus and WastePriority, to surface the highest-impact reclamation opportunities

Prerequisites

The app registration must have the following application permissions configured in Microsoft Entra ID:

• Organization.Read.All — required to retrieve organization-level license and tenant details. Without this permission, document generation fails to fetch SKU and license allocation data.
• User.Read.All — required to read user profiles and their assigned licenses. Without this permission, user-level license details and service plan data aren't available.

Configuration

Use the following steps to generate a License consumption document. Navigate to Azure Documenter to get started.

1. Click New configuration. The Configure your document wizard opens.
2. In Step 1 — Basics, enter a configuration name. Under Choose document type, select License consumption. Click Next.
3. In Step 2 — Service principal, select the service principal and configure the subscription scope. Ensure the selected subscription has a client with appropriate access to retrieve tenant license details. Click Next.
4. Complete Steps 3–6 (Branding, Publish settings, Schedule, Notifications) as required. Click Next after each step.
5. In Step 7 — Review, confirm your configuration and click Finish.

Once generation is complete, a URL is created for the document, and you can download it using the Download link.

Limitations

• Document generation depends on the Organization.Read.All and User.Read.All Microsoft Entra ID permissions being granted with tenant-wide admin consent; missing consent results in incomplete or failed output.