Tenant Management, Groups, and Licensing

The Manage section of the Super Admin Panel is where organization admins administer the tenants themselves: creating new tenants, adjusting their limits, suspending or deleting them, organizing them into reusable groups, and keeping an eye on seat licensing across the whole organization. If you are new to the organization layer — signing in, the tenant switcher, and the cross-tenant monitoring pages — start with the MSSP Organization Overview.

Three pages are covered here: Tenants (lifecycle and configuration), Tenant Groups (named subsets used to scope the combined views), and Licensing (a read-only seat rollup).

How it works

• Every tenant is a full, isolated Surface Security environment. Creating a tenant provisions a fresh environment with its own admins, devices, policies, and data. Organization-level actions manage the container; they never mix one tenant's data with another's.
• Lifecycle status. A tenant is always in one of three states: active (normal operation), suspended (temporarily paused by an organization admin, restorable at any time), or deactivated (soft-deleted — retained and restorable).
• Trial vs. production tenants. Tenants carry a license type. Trial tenants are evaluation environments with an expiry date; they support trial-only actions (extending the trial, marking it as never expiring, clearing its data) and are permanently removed when deleted. Production tenants are deactivated instead of destroyed when deleted, and can be restored.
• Destructive actions are deliberately hard to do by accident. Deleting a tenant requires you to re-confirm your identity (password, or an SSO re-verification for SSO accounts) and then type the tenant's slug to confirm. Clearing a tenant's data also requires typing the slug.
• Seat accounting is advisory, not blocking. Your organization may have a seat pool (a total seat budget). Allocating more seats to tenants than the pool holds produces a visible warning — it does not block the operation, so you can handle true-ups on your own schedule.

Tenants

Super Admin Panel > Manage > Tenants

The page header reads Tenants — Create and manage tenants under your organization, with a Create tenant button on the right. The All tenants table lists each tenant's Name, Slug, Status, and License expiry (showing "Never" for never-expiring tenants), plus an actions menu at the end of each row.

Screenshot

[SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER: The Tenants page — the All tenants table with Name, Slug, Status, and License expiry columns, one tenant's actions menu open showing Configure, Suspend, Extend Trial, Enable Never Expires, Clear Tenant, and Delete.]

Creating a tenant

1. Select Create tenant.
2. Fill in the dialog:
   • Name — the display name (for example "Acme Corp").
   • Slug — a short, unique identifier used in confirmations and technical contexts (for example acme-corp). Choose it carefully; you will type it to confirm destructive actions later.
   • Max employees — the seat allocation for this tenant.
   • Max devices per user — how many enrolled devices each user may have.
3. Select Create.

If the new allocation pushes your organization past its seat pool, a non-blocking warning badge appears on the page after creation — the tenant is still created.

Configuring a tenant

Open the row's actions menu and choose Configure to change the tenant's Name, Max employees, or Max devices per user, then select Save. Raising Max employees above your remaining seat pool shows the same non-blocking over-allocation warning.

Suspending and reactivating

• Suspend pauses an active tenant. Its status badge changes to suspended.
• Reactivate appears in place of Suspend for suspended and deactivated tenants and returns them to active.

Suspension is the right tool for a client that has lapsed on payment or is offboarding gradually — it is instant and fully reversible.

Trial actions

For trial tenants, the actions menu includes:

• Extend Trial — add a number of days (Days to extend) to the trial expiry.
• Enable Never Expires / Disable Never Expires — toggle whether the trial ever expires. Never-expiring tenants show "Never" in the License expiry column.
• Clear Tenant — permanently delete the tenant's data while keeping the tenant itself (useful for resetting a demo or proof-of-value environment). This is destructive: a confirmation dialog titled Clear tenant data requires you to type the tenant's slug before the Clear Tenant button activates.

These actions apply to trial tenants only; attempting them on a production tenant is rejected.

Deleting a tenant

Deletion is a two-step, step-up process:

1. Confirm your identity. A dialog titled Confirm your identity asks for your password ("Deleting a tenant is a privileged action. Enter your password to continue."). If you signed in through SSO, you are re-verified through your SSO session instead.
2. Confirm by name. A second dialog titled Delete tenant explains the consequences and requires you to type the tenant's slug exactly before the Delete Tenant button activates.

What deletion means depends on the tenant's license type:

License type	Effect of Delete
Trial	The tenant and all of its data are permanently removed. This cannot be undone.
Production	The tenant is deactivated (soft-deleted). It disappears from normal operation but is retained and can be restored later with Reactivate.

Screenshot

[SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER: The two delete dialogs side by side — the "Confirm your identity" password step, and the "Delete tenant" confirm-by-slug step with the slug partially typed and the Delete Tenant button still disabled.]

Tenant Groups

Super Admin Panel > Manage > Tenant Groups

Tenant groups are named subsets of your tenants — for example "EMEA", "Healthcare clients", or "Tier 1". Their purpose is filtering: on the Executive Dashboard and Combined Alerts pages, the Scope selector lets you narrow the combined view to a single group instead of all tenants. Groups never grant access — they can only narrow what you already have access to, and they have no effect on the tenants themselves.

The page lists each group as a card showing its name, optional color dot and description, and the tenants it contains as badges. Each card has Edit and Delete buttons; the header has a New Group button.

Creating or editing a group

1. Select New Group (or Edit on an existing card).
2. In the dialog, set:
   • Name — for example "EMEA".
   • Description — optional free text.
   • Color — an optional hex color (for example #3366ff) shown as a dot next to the group name.
   • Tenants — tick the checkboxes for the tenants that belong in this group.
3. Select Save.

A tenant can belong to any number of groups, and a group can be empty.

Deleting a group

Select Delete on the group's card. The confirmation dialog ("Delete tenant group") requires typing the group's name. Deleting a group only removes the saved subset — it does not affect any tenant or its data.

Screenshot

[SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER: The Tenant Groups page with two group cards (one with a color dot and member tenant badges), and the New Group dialog open showing the Name, Description, Color, and Tenants checkbox fields.]

Licensing

Super Admin Panel > Manage > Licensing

The Licensing page is a read-only rollup of seat allocation and usage across your organization — nothing on this page changes anything. Seat allocations are edited per tenant on the Tenants page (Configure > Max employees); the organization seat pool itself is set as part of your commercial agreement.

Three summary cards sit at the top:

• Seat pool — your organization's total seat budget ("Unlimited" if none is set).
• Allocated — the sum of seats reserved across all tenants, shown against the pool. If allocations exceed the pool, the caption turns to a red Exceeds seat pool and an Over-allocated badge appears in the page header.
• Used — live active users across the organization.

Below them, the Per-tenant licensing table lists each tenant's Name, Allocated seats, Used seats (with a warning marker when a tenant is using more than it was allocated), lifecycle Status, and License expiry — with Expired or Expiring soon badges where relevant.

Screenshot

[SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER: The Licensing page with the Over-allocated badge visible in the header, the three summary cards (Seat pool, Allocated with "Exceeds seat pool" in red, Used), and the Per-tenant licensing table with one row showing an over-used warning marker.]

Worked example: onboarding a new client from trial to production

An MSSP wins a new client, "Northwind", and wants a two-week evaluation before converting:

1. On Tenants, select Create tenant: Name "Northwind", Slug northwind, Max employees 250, Max devices per user 3. A warning badge notes the organization is now allocated 2,050 seats against a 2,000-seat pool — noted for the upcoming true-up, but nothing is blocked.
2. The evaluation runs long, so from Northwind's actions menu the admin chooses Extend Trial and adds 14 days.
3. On Tenant Groups, the admin adds Northwind to the existing "New clients" group so the SOC's Combined Alerts view scoped to that group picks it up immediately.
4. The client signs. The trial is converted to a production license, and on Licensing the admin confirms the Allocated total and clears the over-allocation with the vendor.
5. Months later a different evaluation tenant, contoso-poc, is finished: Delete, re-enter password, type contoso-poc — and because it is a trial tenant, it is permanently removed along with its data.

Troubleshooting and FAQ

The Delete Tenant button stays disabled. The confirmation requires the tenant's slug (shown in the dialog text and the table's Slug column), typed exactly — not the display name.

Extend Trial or Clear Tenant reports the tenant was not found. Those actions only apply to trial tenants. For a production tenant they are rejected; use Suspend or Delete (soft) instead.

I deleted a production tenant by mistake. Production deletes are soft. The tenant appears with status deactivated — open its actions menu and choose Reactivate.

Creating a tenant warned me about the seat pool. Did it fail? No. Seat-pool warnings are informational; the tenant was created (or updated) normally. Review the Licensing page to see the current allocation against your pool.

Who can perform these actions? Tenant lifecycle changes, group management, and other organization-level mutations are restricted to organization owners. Other organization admins may see these pages without being able to make changes, depending on their role.