Troubleshooting "Zombie Licensing"

[William Yox]

Hello all,

I am running into a "zombie license" issue with our deprovisioning workflow and hoping someone has seen this behavior before.

Context: We utilize OU-based auto-license assignment. When a user is deprovisioned, they are suspended and moved to a "Deprovisioning" OU where auto-assignment is explicitly disabled. (A fundamentals license is still assigned, but not a paid license - this will be changed to an archived user license soon).

The Issue: Occasionally, users in the Deprovisioning OU retain their license despite the OU settings. I usually run a GAM script to clean these up, but recently I’ve found a subset of users where the license is instantly re-assigned immediately after removal.

I verified this behavior in the Admin Console: I manually removed the license, and the moment I clicked "Save," it was immediately assigned back to the user.

Troubleshooting Steps Taken:

• I tried moving the user to the Root OU and then back to the Deprovisioning OU to trigger a settings refresh, but the behavior persisted.

• I tried using the logs, but I don't see any licensing related events in the investigation tool. Perhaps I'm simply blind.

Has anyone encountered this?

Best,

Bill

[Gray Biggs]

Hi Bill, are you still having this issue?

I'm seeing something similar; I have a script that gathers up student accounts and moves them to an OU with auto-provisioning disabled and then strips licensing. GAM will say that the licensing has been deleted, but on the console it hasn't budged.

Unlike what you're seeing though, I can manually strip their licensing and it sticks. After that, I can use GAM to add and delete licensing and it works just fine.

Strangely, it seems like this issue is only occurring for me on accounts that are over a certain age. I was able to create a test user, move it to our disabled users OU, and then strip their licensing with GAM as normal. I'm curious if you can try a test user like this too and see if the same thing happens?