License utilisation is a new reporting feature in the Microsoft Entra admin portal which enables admins to get a glance of the number of licenses they have available and the number of licenses they are using, both for Microsoft Entra ID Plan 1 and Microsoft Entra ID plan 2 licenses, as reported in a recent Microsoft announcement.
Hopefully, this should prompt admins to either increase or reduce potential license spend depending on utilisation. In most cases, this will likely highlight areas where users may be using premium feature but may not be assigned a premium license. Something that Microsoft does not condone, but also does not yet enforce.. (or at-least it the feature should expand to this asap…)
View license utilisation in the Microsoft Entra admin portal
To view the license utilisation report from the Microsoft Entra admin portal, follow the steps below.
2. Expand Identity > Monitoring & health, then select Usage & insights.
3. Under the Manage heading, select License utilization.
Extract license utilisation report information with Microsoft Graph PowerShell
If you are looking for a programmatic approach to obtaining the same information, you can use Microsoft Graph PowerShell.
Start by connecting to Microsoft Graph PowerShell and consenting to the Reports.Read.All permission.
Connect-MgGraph -Scope Reports.Read.AllThen use the Invoke-MgGraphRequest cmdlet to obtain the information from the /reports/azureADPremiumLicenseInsight endpoint.
$Report = Invoke-MgGraphRequest -Method GET `
-Uri "/beta/reports/azureADPremiumLicenseInsight" -OutputType PSObjectYou can now use dot notation to extract the information.
$Report
$Report.p1FeatureUtilizations
$Report.p2FeatureUtilizations
Wrapping up
This feature is currently in its infancy.. during the public preview, only being able to view Conditional Access user numbers and risk-based Conditional Access users numbers only provides minimal value (if any) to us administrators.
However, Microsoft are on the right track. If and when this feature is expanded, it could be a useful tool to help monitoring and maintain licensing compliance across a tenant.
