Azure Lighthouse is a free service which allows Cloud Service Providers and Managed Service Providers to offer management and monitoring services to their customers. Azure Lighthouse allows for cross-tenant management and multi-subscription management from a single pane of glass, whether that be the Azure portal, Azure Powershell, Azure CLI or the Azure Resource Manager APIs.
Microsoft has fairly recently announced that the Lighthouse service is coming to Microsoft 365 as well. Lighthouse for Microsoft 365 will offer the following features:
- Standardizing device compliance
- Managing threats and antivirus protection
- Simplifying user access management
- Helping CSPs understand the adoption status of Microsoft 365 services across their customers
Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is building on top of the existing multi-tenant features of Microsoft 365 administration. The multi-tenant management experience called All tenants has been rolled out to Microsoft 365 customers. The All tenants list is specifically for admins who manage two or more Microsoft 365 tenants, including:
- Partners who manage on behalf of
- Merger and acquisition scenarios
- Separate test and production environments
- Regulatory requirements for multiple tenants
The All Tenants feature works with the organization switches feature. The organization switcher features allows you to seamlessly switch between organizations that you manage.
Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is currently in private preview and will soon be made available as a public preview release. A Microsoft 365 Lighthouse demo is available in the following video:
To access the public review release, navigate to https://lighthouse.microsoft.com and login with your CSP indirect reseller credentials. If you receive the following message, it means you first need to sign-up for the Microsoft 365 Lighthouse service, as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/lighthouse/m365-lighthouse-sign-up?view=o365-worldwide.
You will first need to purchase the free Microsoft 365 Lighthouse service (free of charge). You need one license per CSP tenant. There is no charge for your end customers or users. After purchasing the service, you should be able to view the Microsoft 365 Lighthouse admin portal, as shown in the example below.
Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is a new experience which makes it easier for you to deliver managed services at scale to small and medium-sized customers. Learn more about Microsoft 365 Lighthouse. Before you get started with the admin portal, there are a few things you should do to get the full Lighthouse experience. Learn how to turn on features in Microsoft 365 Lighthouse. The most important requirement for your Azure AD tenants to appear and be manageable inside the Lighthouse for M365 portal is for them to have at least one Microsoft 365 Business Premium or E3 license (which in turn includes an Azure AD P1 license).
Basic configuration steps
Follow the procedure below to get started with the Microsoft 365 Lighthouse management portal:
- Navigate to https://lighthouse.microsoft.com and login with your CSP tenant admin credentials.
- Click on Next.
- Click Done.
You should now be able to manage all available M365 Lighthouse features:
- Home dashboard
- Tenants
- Users
- Devices
- Threat management
- Baselines
- Windows 365
- Service health
