PIM Manager documentation · Verified against PIM Manager 3.0.23.3 on Nov 3, 2026
Operate
Privileged access drifts, people join and leave, and a single wrong change can lock out a whole tenant. This chapter shows how you run PIM Manager day to day so that each of those events is handled safely and on the record.
The daily loop
PIM Manager works from a desired state that you keep in its database. The engine compares that state with your tenant and makes the tenant match it. Your daily work is mostly three things:
- Change the desired state. Add an admin, give access, change a department. Every edit is staged first and lands under Pending changes (the Review & commit queue).
- Commit. You review the staged changes and commit them. The engine starts and applies them, and checks that they took effect.
- Check what needs you. The Overview and Get Started pages show what waits for a person: held guards, held policy changes, approvals and open setup steps. Your SuperAdmins also get one reminder mail that lists everything waiting on them, with a link to each entry, and it stops by itself when nothing waits.
The Manager’s identity reads your tenant; it does not write roles, groups or accounts there. Those writes are done by the engine’s managed identity, after a commit or on a scheduled run, and are written to the audit trail (Operations > Audit trail). The changes a scheduled run makes without a commit for each one are listed in Change control.
Pages in this chapter
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Guards | The safety brakes: policy changes held for a SuperAdmin, the empty-store gate, removal and delete limits, and stricter limits right after an update. |
| Access reviews | Recurring reviews per department: who reviews, Keep or Remove, reminders and escalation. |
| PIM Activator | The browser extension your admins activate access with, and how to deploy it with or without Intune. |
| Settings | How settings work, who may change them and where every setting is explained. |
Where to look when something is wrong
| You see | Go to |
|---|---|
| A change you committed has not appeared in the tenant | Jobs > Engine logs & errors. Each failed item names the group, role or scope and the reason. |
| The tenant differs from what PIM Manager defines | Reviews & controls > Drift: live vs desired. Missing, changed and extra items, per area. |
| A run says it holds something | Operations > Guards and Reviews & controls > Approvals. See Guards. |
| An access review nobody answers | Reviews & controls > Access reviews. A SuperAdmin can decide any open person. |
| An admin cannot activate | The admin’s eligibility on Access, then the policy limits on Templates > Policy settings. See also the FAQ. |
For step-by-step tasks, see the Knowledge base.
Verified against PIM Manager 3.0.23.3 on Nov 3, 2026Download PDF