SaaS Management

When overseeing multiple clients, clients rely on an ever-growing list of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications—especially Microsoft 365—to power their day-to-day operations. It’s crucial to ensure everyone stays licensed, secure, and productive. Juggling license usage, user activity, and security configurations across many clients can be daunting.

Lifecycle Manager’s SaaS Management functionality provides insights (to the extent available via relevant integrations) into your clients’ license allocations, user activities, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) statuses.

This article shows how Lifecycle Manager’s SaaS Management enables you to monitor your clients' usage of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications and track license consumption, helping you optimize licenses and improve overall security posture.

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What SaaS management monitors

SaaS Management provides visibility into three key areas

  • License Utilization/Consumption - Track how many licenses are assigned versus how many remain available.
  • User Activity - See when users last logged in to identify actively used or potentially wasted licenses.
  • User Configuration & Security Posture - Verify each user’s MFA status and authentication method to address any security gaps.

Better SaaS oversight with Lifecycle Manager

SaaS Management in Lifecycle Manager streamlines license monitoring and upholds security standards across multiple clients. Its License Overview helps you:

  • Identify license shortages: Proactively address low availability by reclaiming unused licenses or purchasing more.
  • Spot suspended licenses: Resolve issues that prevent users from accessing essential services.
  • Track consumption: Monitor how many licenses are Active and Consumed to forecast needs accurately.
  • Pinpoint potential issues: Address warnings such as expiring licenses or billing discrepancies.

A centralized table displays hundreds of results—letting you view each client’s status, product by product. Combine these insights with the Users console for a comprehensive view of Microsoft 365 usage and, in the future, other SaaS applications.

Microsoft 365 Integration

Lifecycle Manager integrates directly with Microsoft 365. Syncing in Microsoft 365 data, you get a consolidated view of licenses and user data. Lifecycle Manager pulls this information from Microsoft 365 and displays it in three main places:

  1. Assets > SaaS Menu (Summary-Level Report - All Clients)
    1. Here, you’ll see an at-a-glance report showing how many licenses are available, how many are consumed, and how many are suspended. This overview is ideal for quickly identifying trends and potential licensing shortfalls across multiple clients.
  2. Microsoft 365 License Summary – Client Level
    1. By clicking the relevant client name in the Client column, you can dig deeper into that client’s specific license usage to pinpoint who is assigned which licenses and spot any anomalies.
  3. Microsoft 365 User Level Reporting
    1. For a look at Microsoft 365 user level reporting, you can see details about individual users and their assigned licenses in the Users console.

Understanding license overview data

When you navigate to the Summary-Level Report - All Clients (Assets > SaaS) in Lifecycle Manager, you’ll see consolidated licensing details across your clients. Each row corresponds to a particular product for a specific client, and each column provides different pieces of data to help you assess license utilization and status at a glance. Following is an explanation of the table’s columns and the information you can expect to find:

  • Client - Displays the name of the client organization. Clicking a client’s name displays specific information about that client’s SaaS usage and licenses.
  • Product - Indicates which product is being tracked, based on current integrations. Examples could include Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Premium, or Standard.
  • Status - Shows whether the license for that product is currently Enabled, Suspended, or Unknown.
    • Enabled means a license is active and usable.
    • Suspended indicates that a license is not available for assignment or usage.
    • Unknown may appear if the system cannot fetch or confirm the license’s status at the time of the data sync.
  • Active - The number of licenses actively assigned to users.
  • Consumed - Displays the total number of licenses that have been assigned (or “consumed”). In many cases, this value will be the same as Active, but it could differ depending on license state transitions or incomplete user assignments.
  • Available - Shows how many licenses remain for assignment. A low or zero value here indicates you may need to acquire more licenses or redistribute existing ones.
  • Suspended - The count of licenses that are suspended or otherwise inactive. Suspended licenses are not accessible by users, which could be due to billing issues, policy constraints, or manual deactivation.

In the SaaS Summary interface, the search bar allows you to quickly filter the list of clients. When you enter a keyword (for example, “Bi”), the table dynamically updates to show only rows containing that text from the Client and Product columns). This helps pinpoint relevant entries without manually scanning through large datasets. You can also combine the search bar with additional filters (like Status) to further refine the results.

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Lifecycle Manager displays information that reflects the status at the time of your Last Sync Date with the required integration.


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