In Substly, an approved service is always a managed service. Managing a service means your organization now keeps track of usage, licenses, and costs by connecting individual users to the right service accounts and pricing plans.
You can choose whether to manage a service yourself, by assigning licenses manually - or, you can let Substly assign licenses for you.
Auto-Managed: Let Substly assign licenses
By default, all services in Substly are automatically managed. This means that users are connected to services based on detected usage - if an employee starts using an approved service, Substly links them to that service and assigns a license. False positives are rare, as activity such as casual browsing or simply looking at a shared link is filtered out.
For most services, this is an excellent setup. It gives you an accurate overview of what’s actually being used across your organization, without any manual work needed.
Admin-Managed: Assign licenses manually
For some services, a manual approach works better.
This can be the case if the license structure is complex, if you want to manage a service that is used locally, or if the service has an unusual URL structure that makes active usage difficult to distinguish.
You can switch a service to manual management at any time. Substly will still detect when users access the service, but it won’t assign a license automatically. Instead, detected usage will appear as Unsanctioned for the individual user until they are manually assigned a license.
This ensures you can maintain control, and trust data across your services.
How to switch a service from Auto-Managed to Admin-Managed
Now that you understand the difference between Auto-Managed and Admin-Managed modes, you might want to update how a specific service is handled.
Here’s how to change the setting:
Go to the Approved services page and select the service you want to update.
Click Manage Service, then open the Settings tab.
Under License Management, select whether the service should be Auto-Managed or Admin-Managed.
The change takes effect immediately.
If you switch a service to be Admin-Managed, Substly will still detect usage, but will no longer assign licenses automatically. Detected usage will now appear as Unsanctioned until it can be reviewed by an admin, and the new user is manually assigned a license.