Use service admin roles to manage your tenant

Note

The new and improved Power Platform admin center is now generally available. We're currently updating the documentation to reflect these changes, so check back to ensure that you're getting the latest updates.

To help you administer environments and settings for the Microsoft Power Platform, you can assign users to manage the service at the tenant level without having to assign a role that provides access to other services within the tenant.

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 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, Power Platform administrator, or Global administrator role is assigned to a user in Microsoft Entra ID, the user is no longer automatically assigned to the system administrator role in environments. For more information on how to gain access to the system administrator role and remove such access, see Manage admin roles with Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management.

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 Privileged Role Administrator role

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 Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM) time-based role activation to manage your service admin roles, see Manage admin roles with Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management.

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.

Note

Global admin, Power Platform admin, and the Dynamics 365 admin roles must be directly assigned for a user. Role association through security groups is not supported.

	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
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	Yes	No
View and manage environment policies	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Copilot
View Copilot page in Power Platform admin center	Yes	Yes	Yes	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 after self-elevation. 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 no security group is assigned to the environment, or if a security group is assigned and the user with this role is added to it.

See also

Environments overview
What is Power BI administration?