What are Azure Enterprise Applications and Service Principals?
Azure Enterprise Applications are apps registered via Entra (Azure Active Directory), an Identity and Access Management (IAM) system, to provide secure and orchestrated access. Upon app registration in Entra a service principal, representing a blueprint of the application object, is created. The service principal now represents the local application instance in your tenant or directory, deriving from a global application. As the authorization endpoint, the service principal defines what the application can do in target directories, who can use it, what resources it can access, and so on.

How do they affect your work?

As an IT admin, you want to know if you want to secure any unsecured apps in your tenant. You also want to know for which app registration the application secrets will expire. Preventing the visibility of confidential app registrations will prevent security breaches. If the application secrets expire, non of your users can reach the app, nor will the app itself be operating anymore. Imagine a crucial company-wide app going down, and all services will stop. And your only clue is an end-user support storm pointing to no objective source?

Why you should monitor Service Principals

Monitoring Service Principals of Azure Enterprise Applications helps you keep track of upcoming application secret expiries and check for application compliance. The centralized monitoring of all service principals in a specific tenant is a big advantage in mapping and meeting security policies.