Azure Portal Users/Audit Logs Filters non functional

Hello Dustin McNeill,

Greetings! Thanks for raising this question in the Q&A forum.

Since the filter panel opens but the dropdown options themselves are empty, and this is isolated to one tenant while a second tenant works fine, this points to either a caching or session issue in that specific tenant's browser context, or a backend service issue affecting log metadata retrieval for that tenant specifically, rather than a global portal outage. Since it reproduces across browsers and in Incognito mode, it is not a local browser extension conflict, which narrows it down to either tenant-side state or a service-side problem. Here is how to isolate and work around it.

Clear cached portal settings for the affected tenant Azure and Entra portal preferences are cached per account. Go to the Azure portal, open Settings (gear icon) > Directories + subscriptions, and confirm you're on the correct directory. Then clear portal settings entirely by going to portal.azure.com/#settings and selecting Reset to default settings, or clear your browser's site data specifically for portal.azure.com and entra.microsoft.com before signing back in.

Confirm the account's role assignment in that tenant The filter categories in Audit logs are populated based on the licensed services and roles available to the signed-in account in that specific tenant. Confirm the affected admin accounts hold at least Reports Reader, Security Reader, or Global Administrator in the affected tenant, since a missing or delayed role assignment can cause the filter metadata calls to return empty results even though the page itself loads.

Check Diagnostic settings and log retention configuration Go to Entra ID > Monitoring & health > Diagnostic settings and confirm nothing has changed recently, such as an export destination being removed or retention settings being modified, since this can sometimes affect how the admin center populates filter metadata.

Test with the filters fully removed On the Audit logs page, remove all filters and check if any log entries display at all with just the default date range applied. If logs display without filters but the filter dropdown options themselves stay empty, this confirms the issue is specific to filter metadata loading rather than the underlying log data.

Use an alternate access path as a workaround While this is being investigated, you can retrieve the same data through Microsoft Graph or PowerShell, which bypasses the portal UI filter issue entirely:

Get-MgAuditLogDirectoryAudit -Filter "activityDisplayName eq '<activity>'"

Or query directly via Graph:

GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/auditLogs/directoryAudits

Report this without a paid support plan You do not need a paid support plan to report a suspected service defect. Use the feedback smiley icon in the top right of the Azure portal or Entra admin center to submit a "Something's not working" report, which routes directly to the product engineering team rather than support billing. You can also check and report through the Azure Status page and the Service Health blade in the portal under Help + support > Service Health, which is free for all subscription types and shows tenant-specific health advisories that may already be tracking this.

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Best Regards,

Jerald Felix.