Organizations, Tenants, and Identities

Organizations, tenants, and identities

Understanding how Petra organizes your data helps you navigate the product and know where to look for information. Petra uses three main concepts: organizations, tenants, and identities.

Organizations

An organization is your company or MSP account in Petra. It's the top-level container. Everything you do in Petra happens within an organization. An organization has a name, a set of members (people who can log in and use Petra), and notification settings that apply across the organization. If you're an MSP, you might have one organization that represents your MSP, and under it you'll see all of your customers' tenants.

Tenants

A tenant is a Microsoft 365 environment that Petra is monitoring. Typically, one tenant corresponds to one customer or one Microsoft 365 subscription. When you "add a tenant" or "onboard" a tenant, you're connecting that Microsoft 365 environment to Petra so it can collect and analyze activity there. Each tenant has a display name (usually the customer or company name), and Petra shows you a list of your tenants so you can switch between them to view incidents, reports, and logs for that specific environment.

Tenants belong to exactly one organization. So if you have multiple organizations (for example, separate accounts), each tenant is tied to one of them. All members of that organization who have access to the tenant can see its data.

Identities

An identity is a user (person or service account) inside a Microsoft 365 tenant. Petra discovers identities from the tenant—things like display name, email address, and sign-in methods. When an incident occurs, it's always tied to an identity: "this user's account was compromised" or "this user received and interacted with a phish." You can look at a specific identity's page in Petra to see their details, authentication methods, and activity logs, which is useful when investigating an incident or understanding a user's security posture.

Identities are scoped to a tenant. The same person might appear as different identities in different tenants if you're managing multiple Microsoft 365 environments.

How they work together

You sign in to Petra under an organization. From there you see that organization's tenants. When you open a tenant, you see its incidents, reporting, and logs, and you can drill into individual identities (users) when you need to. This structure keeps data organized and ensures you're always looking at the right scope—organization-wide settings, tenant-specific data, or a single user's activity.