View the service principal of a managed identity using Azure CLI

Managed identities for Azure resources provide Azure services with an automatically managed identity in Microsoft Entra ID. You can use this identity to authenticate to any service that supports Microsoft Entra authentication without having credentials in your code.

In this article, you learn how to view the service principal of a managed identity using Azure CLI.

If you don't already have an Azure account, sign up for a free account before continuing.

Prerequisites

• If you're unfamiliar with managed identities for Azure resources, see What are managed identities for Azure resources?.

• Enable system assigned identity on a virtual machine or application.

• Use the Bash environment in Azure Cloud Shell. For more information, see Quickstart for Bash in Azure Cloud Shell.

  

• If you prefer to run CLI reference commands locally, install the Azure CLI. If you're running on Windows or macOS, consider running Azure CLI in a Docker container. For more information, see How to run the Azure CLI in a Docker container.

  • If you're using a local installation, sign in to the Azure CLI by using the az login command. To finish the authentication process, follow the steps displayed in your terminal. For other sign-in options, see Sign in with the Azure CLI.

  • When you're prompted, install the Azure CLI extension on first use. For more information about extensions, see Use extensions with the Azure CLI.

  • Run az version to find the version and dependent libraries that are installed. To upgrade to the latest version, run az upgrade.

View the service principal

This following command demonstrates how to view the service principal of a VM or application with managed identity enabled. Replace <Azure resource name> with your own values.

az ad sp list --display-name <Azure resource name>

Next steps

For more information on managing Microsoft Entra service principals, see Azure CLI ad sp.