Microsoft 365 admin center and usage analytics
You use the admin center to set up your organization in the cloud, manage users, manage subscriptions, and much more. In this article, learn how to get to the admin center and learn about available features and settings.
How to get to the admin center
- Sign in at admin.microsoft.com with your admin account.
- Select the app launcher icon in the upper-left and choose Admin.The Admin tile appears only to people who have Microsoft 365 admin permissions. If you don’t see the tile, then you don’t have permissions to access the admin center for your organization.
Admin center features and settings
Here are the features and settings you’ll find in the left-hand navigation of the admin center. Learn more about admin tasks in admin help.
| Menu | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| Home | This is the landing page in the admin center. You’ll see where to manage users, billing, service health, and reports. |
| Users | Create and manage users in your organization, like employees or students. You can also set their permission level or reset their passwords. |
| Groups | Create and manage groups in your organization, such as a Microsoft 365 group, distribution group, security group, or shared mailbox. Learn how to create and manage groups. |
| Resources | Create and manage resources, like a SharePoint site collection. Learn how to create site collections. |
| Billing | View, purchase, or cancel subscriptions for your organization. View past billing statements or view the number of assigned licenses to individual users. Learn how to manage billing. |
| Support | View existing service requests or create new ones. Learn more in Contact support for business products – Admin Help. |
| Settings | Manage global settings for apps like email, sites, and the Office suite. Change your password policy and expiration date. Add and update domain names like contoso.com. |
| Setup | Manage existing domains, turn on and manage multi-factor authentication, manage admin access, migrate user mailboxes to Office 365, manage feature updates, and help users install their Office apps. |
| Reports | See at a glance how your organization is using Microsoft 365 with detailed reports on email use, Office activations, and more. Learn how to use the new activity reports. |
| Health | View the service health at a glance. You can also check out more details and the service health history. Check out How to check service health. |
| Admin centers | Open separate admin centers for Exchange, Skype for Business, SharePoint, Yammer, and Azure AD. Each admin center includes all available settings for that service. |
Executive summary
The executive summary is a high-level, at-a-glance view of Microsoft 365 for Business adoption, usage, mobility, communication, collaboration, and storage reports, and is meant for business decision makers. It provides a view into how some individual services are being used, based on all the users who have been enabled and those who are active. All values of the month shown on the report refer to the latest complete month.
Overview
The Microsoft 365 overview report contains the following reports. You can view them by choosing the tab on top of the report page. All values of the month shown on the top section of the report refer to the latest complete month.
- Adoption – Offers an all-up summary of adoption trends. Use the reports in this section to learn how your users have adopted Microsoft 365, as well as how overall usage of the individual services has changed month over month.
- Usage – Offers a drill-down view into the volume of active users and the key activities for each product for the last 12 months. Use the reports in this section to learn how people in your organization are using Microsoft 365.
- Communication – You can see at a glance whether people in your organization prefer to stay in touch by using Teams, Yammer, email, or Skype calls. You can observe if there are shifts in patterns in the use of communication tools among your employees.
- Collaboration – See how people in your organization use OneDrive and SharePoint to store documents and collaborate with each other, and how these trends evolve month over month. You can also see how many documents are shared internally or externally and how many SharePoint sites or OneDrive accounts are actively being used, broken out by owners and other collaborators.
- Storage – Use this report to track cloud storage for mailboxes, OneDrive, and SharePoint sites.
- Mobility – Track which clients and devices people use to connect to email, Teams, Skype, or Yammer.
Activation and licensing
The activation and license page offers reports on Microsoft 365 activation; that is, how many users have downloaded and activated Office apps and how many licenses have been assigned by your organization. The month value towards the top refers to the current month, and the metrics reflect values aggregated from the beginning of the month to the current date.
- Activation – Track service plan (for example, Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, Project, and Visio) activations in your organization. Each person with an Office license can install products on up to five devices. You can also use reports in this section to see the devices on which people have installed Office apps. Note that to activate a plan, a user must install the app and sign in with their account.
- Licensing – This report contains an overview of license types, the count of users who were assigned each license type, and the license assignment distribution for each month. The month value towards the top refers to the current month, and the metrics reflect values aggregated from the beginning of the month to the current date.
Reference Documentation – Microsoft 365 usage analytics, About the Microsoft 365 admin center