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Use service admin roles to manage your tenant

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To help you administer environments and settings for Microsoft Power Platform, you can assign users to manage at the tenant level without having to assign the more powerful Microsoft 365 global admin privilege.

There are two Power Platform related service admin roles you can assign to provide a high level of admin management.

Note

These (and other) admin roles only apply to what you can do in the Power Platform admin center. For example, Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management are currently not managed in the Power Platform admin center.

Dynamics 365 administrator

The Dynamics 365 admin can:

  • Sign in to and manage multiple environments. If an environment uses a security group, a service admin would need to be added to the security group in order to manage that environment. Not assigning to an in place security group essentially locks these admins out of any admin management.
  • Perform admin functions in Microsoft Power Platform because they have the System Administrator role.

Power Platform administrator

Users with the Power Platform admin role can:

  • Sign in to and manage multiple environments. Power Platform admins are not affected by security group membership and can manage environments even if not added to an environment's security group.
  • Perform admin functions in Microsoft Power Platform because they have the System Administrator role.

Both service admin roles cannot do functions restricted to the Microsoft 365 global admin such as manage user accounts, manage subscriptions, access settings for Microsoft 365 apps like Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SharePoint.

Assign a service admin role to a user

Follow these steps to assign a service admin role.

Note

When the Dynamics 365 administrator role is granted to a user in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), they will get the System Administrator role in environments as well. When the Dynamics 365 administrator role is removed in Azure AD, user synchronization doesn't remove the System Administrator role. So, even though this user is no longer a Dynamics 365 administrator in Azure AD, they still remain a system administrator in the tenant and will be able to see all environments. We recommend manually removing the System Administrator role in all environments as soon as the role is removed from Azure AD.

To opt-out of automatic license-based user roles, see Opt-out of automatic license-based user roles management.

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center as a global admin.

  2. Go to Users > Active users and select a user.

  3. Under Account > Roles select Manage roles.

  4. Select to expand Show all by category.

  5. Under Collaboration select either Dynamics 365 administrator or Power Platform administrator.

  6. Select Save changes.

Note

If you are using the Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM) time-based role activation to manage your service admin roles, the service administrator permission is NOT removed from the environment when the time-based role activation expires.

Service Admin roles must be assigned directly to users, as inheriting from security groups is not fully supported.

Service administrator permission matrix

The following matrix shows what management is possible with the various service admin roles compared to the Microsoft 365 global admin role.

  Microsoft 365
Global admin
 Power Platform
admin
Dynamics 365
admin
 Power BI
admin
POWER PLATFORM
Environments
Full access1 Yes Yes Yes2 No
Create Yes Yes Yes2 No
Delete Yes Yes Yes2 No
Backup and restore Yes Yes Yes2 No
Copy Yes Yes Yes2 No
Ability to exclude access from selected environments (using security groups) No No Yes Yes
Analytics
Capacity Yes Yes Yes2 No
Capacity allocation (Power Apps per app plans, Power Automate, AI Builder, and Portal) Yes Yes Yes2 No
Microsoft Dataverse Yes Yes Yes2 No
Power Automate Yes Yes Yes2 No
Power Apps Yes Yes Yes2 No
Help + support
Create and access support requests Yes Yes Yes2 No
Data integration
Create new project and connection set Yes Yes Yes2 No
Data gateways
View gateways Yes Yes Yes2 No
Data policies
View and manage tenant policies Yes Yes Yes2 No
View and manage environment policies Yes Yes Yes2 No
POWER BI
Manage the Power BI tenant Yes Yes No Yes
Acquire and assign Power BI licenses Yes No No No
MICROSOFT 365
Create users Yes No No No
Add security roles Yes No No No
Add licenses Yes No No No

1Equivalent permission level to a System Administrator. Has full permission to customize or administer the environment, including creating, modifying, and assigning security roles. Can view all data in the environment - if the user has a suitable license.

2If a security group is assigned to the environment and the user with this role added to the security group

See also

Environments overview
What is Power BI administration?