Cleanup & troubleshoot service principals

2025-07-07

You learned how to create, retrieve, and work with service principals. Now that you completed the tutorial, it's time to clean up the created service principal resources.

Cleanup service principal resources

The safest way to remove all resources used in this tutorial is to use az group delete. The --no-wait parameter keeps the CLI from blocking while the deletion takes place.

az group delete --name myResourceGroup --no-wait

If you prefer, delete individual service principals with the az ad sp delete command.

az ad sp delete --id myServicePrincipalID

Troubleshoot service principals

Although you completed the tutorial, you might still have questions regarding service principals that can be answered in this section.

Insufficient privileges

If your account doesn't have permission to create a service principal, az ad sp create-for-rbac returns an error message containing "Insufficient privileges to complete the operation." Contact your Microsoft Entra administrator to obtain User Access Administrator or Role Based Access Control Administrator permissions.

Invalid tenant

If you specified an invalid subscription ID, you see the error message "The request didn't have a subscription or a valid tenant level resource provider." If using variables, use the Bash echo command to see the value being passed to the reference command. Use az account set to change your subscription or learn How to manage Azure subscriptions with the Azure CLI.

Resource group not found

If you specified an invalid resource group name, you see the error message "Resource group 'name' couldn't be found." If using variables, use the Bash echo command to see the value being passed to both the subscription and reference commands. Use az group list to see the resource groups for the current subscription, or learn How to manage Azure resource groups with the Azure CLI.

Authorization to perform action

If your account doesn't have permission to assign a role, you see an error message that your account "doesn't have authorization to perform action 'Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments/write'." Contact your Microsoft Entra administrator to manage roles.

Interactive authentication is needed

When signing in with password authentication, error message "...Interactive authentication is needed..." occurs if your organization requires multifactor authentication. Switch to certificate-based authentication, or consider using managed identities.

Compliant device required

If you try to create a service principal using a device that's not compliant with your organization's access policies, you receive the message "...Conditional Access policy requires a compliant device...". Switch to a computer that meets your organization's access policies.