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Enable accidental deletions prevention in the Microsoft Entra provisioning service

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The Microsoft Entra provisioning service includes a feature to help avoid accidental deletions. This feature ensures that users aren't disabled or deleted in an application unexpectedly.

The Microsoft Entra provisioning service includes a feature to help avoid accidental deletions. This feature ensures that users aren't disabled or deleted in the target tenant unexpectedly.

You use accidental deletions to specify a deletion threshold. Anything above the threshold that you set requires an admin to explicitly allow the processing of the deletions.

Configure accidental deletion prevention

To enable accidental deletion prevention:

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center as at least an Application Administrator.
  2. Browse to Identity > Applications > Enterprise applications.
  3. Select your application.
  4. Select Provisioning and then on the provisioning page select Edit provisioning.
  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center as at least an Application Administrator.
  2. Browse to Identity > External Identities > Cross-tenant synchronization > Configurations and then select your configuration.
  3. Select Provisioning.
  1. Under Settings, select the Prevent accidental deletions check box and specify a deletion threshold.
  2. Ensure the Notification Email address is completed. If the deletion threshold is met, an email is sent.
  3. Select Save to save the changes.

When the deletion threshold is met, the job goes into quarantine, and a notification email is sent. The quarantined job can then be allowed or rejected. To learn more about quarantine behavior, see Application provisioning in quarantine status.

Recovering from an accidental deletion

When you encounter an accidental deletion, you see it on the provisioning status page. It says Provisioning has been quarantined. See quarantine details for more information.

You can click either Allow deletes or View provisioning logs.

Allowing deletions

The Allow deletes action deletes the objects that triggered the accidental delete threshold. Use the procedure to accept the deletions.

  1. Select Allow deletes.
  2. Click Yes on the confirmation to allow the deletions.
  3. View the confirmation that the deletions were accepted. The status returns to healthy with the next cycle.

Rejecting deletions

Investigate and reject deletions as necessary:

  • Investigate the source of the deletions. You can use the provisioning logs for details.
  • Prevent the deletion by assigning the user / group to the application (or configuration) again, restoring the user / group, or updating your provisioning configuration.
  • Once you've made the necessary changes to prevent the user / group from being deleted, restart provisioning. Don't restart provisioning until you've made the necessary changes to prevent the users / groups from being deleted.

Test deletion prevention

You can test the feature by triggering disable / deletion events by setting the threshold to a low number, for example 3, and then changing scoping filters, unassigning users, and deleting users from the directory (see common scenarios in next section).

Let the provisioning job run (20 – 40 mins) and navigate back to the provisioning page. Check the provisioning job in quarantine and choose to allow the deletions or review the provisioning logs to understand why the deletions occurred.

Common deprovisioning scenarios to test

  • Delete a user / put them into the recycle bin.
  • Block sign in for a user.
  • Unassign a user or group from the application (or configuration).
  • Remove a user from a group that's provides them access to the application (or configuration).

To learn more about deprovisioning scenarios, see How Application Provisioning Works.

Frequently Asked Questions

What scenarios count toward the deletion threshold?

When a user is set for removal from the target application (or target tenant), it's counted against the deletion threshold. Scenarios that could lead to a user being removed from the target application (or target tenant) could include: unassigning the user from the application (or configuration) and soft / hard deleting a user in the directory. Groups evaluated for deletion count towards the deletion threshold. In addition to deletions, the same functionality also works for disables.

What is the interval that the deletion threshold is evaluated on?

It's evaluated each cycle. If the number of deletions doesn't exceed the threshold during a single cycle, the “circuit breaker” isn't triggered. If multiple cycles are needed to reach a steady state, the deletion threshold is evaluated per cycle.

How are these deletion events logged?

You can find users that should be disabled / deleted but haven’t due to the deletion threshold. Navigation to Provisioning logs and then filter Action with StagedAction or StagedDelete.

Next steps