Understanding the new Quota Limits dashboard

The re-introduction of the Quota Limits page in Dynamics 365 Marketing has spurred a little confusion. Especially the phrase “Other orgs”.

I think the confusion mainly comes down to terminology. How to understand the word “org” (organization) and a “tenant”.

Our friends at the Azure side of the house works with this definition: “A tenant represents an organization”

Whereas us Dynamics 365 / Power Platform folks historically has considered an organization (org), also known as an instance, a home for your apps, be it production or sandbox (test, dev, UAT)

Nowadays orgs and instances are known as environments. Note how my sandbox environment below has a Organization ID.

So to repeat my self – I think the confusion comes down to terminology. I always thought of the word “org” as an instance or an environment. With this lens, its probably a bit easier to understand the label “other orgs” (consider it “other environments”), but please allow me to pin it out with the below example for a fictitious company Contoso, who has two divisions, North and South.

Example

Contoso have purchased 200,000 marketable contacts for their Contoso tenant, which is home for Contoso’s North and South business divisions. Remember, marketable contacts are shared across the tenant, and consumption is pooled across environments in the tenant.

Contoso have provisioned six organizations (aka orgs aka instances aka environments) in their tenant (two production orgs, and four sandbox orgs (for dev and test))

Contoso purchased six marketing apps; one Attach Application and one Additional Application (for prod), and four Additional Non-Production Application (for dev and test)

When Contoso started using the marketing apps, they started consuming marketable contacts across orgs and apps (remember – one org/one marketing app)

A Contoso user can open the Quota Limits page in a Marketing app in an org, eg. the production org in Contoso North, and see the consumption for this org – as well as the aggregated consumption for the other five orgs in the tenant.