Cross-tenant management experiences

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As a service provider, you can use Azure Lighthouse to manage your customers' Azure resources from within your own Microsoft Entra tenant. Many common tasks and services can be performed across these managed tenants.

Tip

Azure Lighthouse can also be used within an enterprise which has multiple Microsoft Entra tenants of its own to simplify cross-tenant administration.

Understanding tenants and delegation

A Microsoft Entra tenant is a representation of an organization. It's a dedicated instance of Microsoft Entra ID that an organization receives when they create a relationship with Microsoft by signing up for Azure, Microsoft 365, or other services. Each Microsoft Entra tenant is distinct and separate from other Microsoft Entra tenants, and has its own tenant ID (a GUID). For more information, see What is Microsoft Entra ID?

Typically, in order to manage Azure resources for a customer, service providers must sign in to the Azure portal using an account associated with that customer's tenant. In this scenario, an administrator in the customer's tenant must create and manage user accounts for the service provider.

With Azure Lighthouse, the onboarding process specifies users in the service provider's tenant who are assigned roles to delegated subscriptions and resource groups in the customer's tenant. These users can then sign in to the Azure portal, using their own credentials, and work on resources belonging to all of the customers to which they have access. Users in the managing tenant can see all of these customers by visiting the My customers page in the Azure portal. They can also work on resources directly within the context of that customer's subscription, either in the Azure portal or via APIs.

Azure Lighthouse provides flexibility to manage resources for multiple customers without having to sign in to different accounts in different tenants. For example, a service provider may have two customers with different responsibilities and access levels. Using Azure Lighthouse, authorized users can sign in to the service provider's tenant and access all of the delegated resources across these customers, according to the roles they've been assigned for each delegation.

Diagram showing resources for two customers managed through one service provider tenant.

APIs and management tool support

You can perform management tasks on delegated resources in the Azure portal, or you can use APIs and management tools such as Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell. All existing APIs can be used on delegated resources, as long as the functionality is supported for cross-tenant management and the user has the appropriate permissions.

The Azure PowerShell Get-AzSubscription cmdlet shows the TenantId for the managing tenant by default. The HomeTenantId and ManagedByTenantIds attributes for each subscription allow you to identify whether a returned subscription belongs to a managed tenant or to your managing tenant.

Similarly, Azure CLI commands such as az account list show the homeTenantId and managedByTenants attributes. If you don't see these values when using Azure CLI, try clearing your cache by running az account clear followed by az login --identity.

In the Azure REST API, the Subscriptions - Get and Subscriptions - List commands include ManagedByTenant.

Note

In addition to tenant information related to Azure Lighthouse, tenants shown by these APIs may also reflect partner tenants for Azure Databricks or Azure managed applications.

We also provide APIs that are specific to performing Azure Lighthouse tasks. For more info, see the Reference section.

Enhanced services and scenarios

Most Azure tasks and services can be used with delegated resources across managed tenants, assuming the appropriate roles are granted. Below are some of the key scenarios where cross-tenant management can be especially effective.

Azure Arc:

Azure Automation:

  • Use Automation accounts to access and work with delegated resources

Azure Backup:

  • Back up and restore customer data using Azure Backup. Currently, the following Azure workloads are supported: Azure Virtual Machines (Azure VM), Azure Files, SQL Server on Azure VMs, SAP HANA on Azure VMs. Workloads which leverage Backup vault (such as Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Blob, Azure Managed Disk, and Azure Kubernetes Services) currently aren't fully supported.
  • View data for all delegated customer resources in Backup center
  • Use the Backup Explorer to help view operational information of backup items (including Azure resources not yet configured for backup) and monitoring information (jobs and alerts) for delegated subscriptions. The Backup Explorer is currently available only for Azure VM data.
  • Use Backup reports across delegated subscriptions to track historical trends, analyze backup storage consumption, and audit backups and restores.

Azure Key Vault:

  • Create Key Vaults in customer tenants
  • Use a managed identity to create Key Vaults in customer tenants

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS):

  • Manage hosted Kubernetes environments and deploy and manage containerized applications within customer tenants
  • Deploy and manage clusters in customer tenants
  • Use Azure Monitor for containers to monitor performance across customer tenants

Azure Migrate:

  • Create migration projects in the customer tenant and migrate VMs

Azure Monitor:

  • View alerts for delegated subscriptions, with the ability to view and refresh alerts across all subscriptions
  • View activity log details for delegated subscriptions
  • Log analytics: Query data from remote workspaces in multiple tenants (note that automation accounts used to access data from workspaces in customer tenants must be created in the same tenant)
  • Create, view, and manage alerts in customer tenants
  • Create alerts in customer tenants that trigger automation, such as Azure Automation runbooks or Azure Functions, in the managing tenant through webhooks
  • Create diagnostic settings in workspaces created in customer tenants, to send resource logs to workspaces in the managing tenant
  • For SAP workloads, monitor SAP Solutions metrics with an aggregated view across customer tenants
  • For Azure AD B2C, route sign-in and auditing logs to different monitoring solutions

Azure Networking:

Azure Policy:

  • Create and edit policy definitions within delegated subscriptions
  • Deploy policy definitions and policy assignments across multiple tenants
  • Assign customer-defined policy definitions within delegated subscriptions
  • Customers see policies authored by the service provider alongside any policies they've authored themselves
  • Can remediate deployIfNotExists or modify assignments within the managed tenant
  • Note that viewing compliance details for non-compliant resources in customer tenants is not currently supported

Azure Resource Graph:

  • See the tenant ID in returned query results, allowing you to identify whether a subscription belongs to a managed tenant

Azure Service Health:

  • Monitor the health of customer resources with Azure Resource Health
  • Track the health of the Azure services used by your customers

Azure Site Recovery:

  • Manage disaster recovery options for Azure virtual machines in customer tenants (note that you can't use RunAs accounts to copy VM extensions)

Azure Virtual Machines:

  • Use virtual machine extensions to provide post-deployment configuration and automation tasks on Azure VMs
  • Use boot diagnostics to troubleshoot Azure VMs
  • Access VMs with serial console
  • Integrate VMs with Azure Key Vault for passwords, secrets, or cryptographic keys for disk encryption by using managed identity through policy, ensuring that secrets are stored in a Key Vault in the managed tenants
  • Note that you can't use Microsoft Entra ID for remote login to VMs

Microsoft Defender for Cloud:

  • Cross-tenant visibility
    • Monitor compliance with security policies and ensure security coverage across all tenants' resources
    • Continuous regulatory compliance monitoring across multiple tenants in a single view
    • Monitor, triage, and prioritize actionable security recommendations with secure score calculation
  • Cross-tenant security posture management
    • Manage security policies
    • Take action on resources that are out of compliance with actionable security recommendations
    • Collect and store security-related data
  • Cross-tenant threat detection and protection
    • Detect threats across tenants' resources
    • Apply advanced threat protection controls such as just-in-time (JIT) VM access
    • Harden network security group configuration with Adaptive Network Hardening
    • Ensure servers are running only the applications and processes they should be with adaptive application controls
    • Monitor changes to important files and registry entries with File Integrity Monitoring (FIM)
  • Note that the entire subscription must be delegated to the managing tenant; Microsoft Defender for Cloud scenarios are not supported with delegated resource groups

Microsoft Sentinel:

Support requests:

Current limitations

With all scenarios, be aware of the following current limitations:

  • Requests handled by Azure Resource Manager can be performed using Azure Lighthouse. The operation URIs for these requests start with https://management.chinacloudapi.cn. However, requests that are handled by an instance of a resource type (such as Key Vault secrets access or storage data access) aren't supported with Azure Lighthouse. The operation URIs for these requests typically start with an address that is unique to your instance, such as https://myaccount.blob.core.chinacloudapi.cn or https://mykeyvault.vault.azure.cn/. The latter are also typically data operations rather than management operations.
  • Role assignments must use Azure built-in roles. All built-in roles are currently supported with Azure Lighthouse, except for Owner or any built-in roles with DataActions permission. The User Access Administrator role is supported only for limited use in assigning roles to managed identities. Custom roles and classic subscription administrator roles are not supported. For more information, see Role support for Azure Lighthouse.
  • For users in the managed tenant, role assignments made through Azure Lighthouse aren't shown under Access Control (IAM) or with CLI tools such as az role assignment list. These assignments are only visible in the Azure portal in the Delegations section of Azure Lighthouse, or through the Azure Lighthouse API.
  • While you can onboard subscriptions that use Azure Databricks, users in the managing tenant can't launch Azure Databricks workspaces on a delegated subscription.
  • While you can onboard subscriptions and resource groups that have resource locks, those locks won't prevent actions from being performed by users in the managing tenant. Deny assignments that protect system-managed resources (system-assigned deny assignments), such as those created by Azure managed applications or Azure Blueprints, do prevent users in the managing tenant from acting on those resources. However, users in the customer tenant can't create their own deny assignments.
  • Delegation of subscriptions across a national cloud and the Azure public cloud, or across two separate national clouds, is not supported.

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