An accurate representation of the people in your organization is critical to clarity in our analytics. You may see people, counts, or accounts that surprise you in tyGraph.
This article will explain some of the many user accounts you'll find in tyGraph data that you may not be expecting.
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People in tyGraph
We take a people-focused approach to users at tyGraph. We piece together thousands of fragments of information across the Microsoft ecosystem to build a profile for a person.
Using the tyGraph Engine, we combine accounts to form a consolidated picture of a person's behavior in Microsoft 365.
 | External UsersExternal users are included in the tyGraph dataset. There are many cases where external users will access SharePoint content, OneDrive files, or participate in Yammer or Teams discussions. External users will often have their categorical data backfilled. See Situations Where We Backfill User Attributes : Support (tygraph.com) for details. |
 | AliasesMany people have additional aliases to manage content or administrate resources. For example, .onmicrosoft.com accounts. These will be mapped to the primary account of a person. We won't display these aliases in tyGraph, and any activity from them will be bundled under the person's primary account. |
 | Historic AccountsPeople come and go, but their historic contribution doesn't necessarily disappear with them. When a person leaves the organization, we keep a record of them to accurately represent their historical contribution for as long as we will report on their activity*. If we were to remove a user and all their activity the day they leave, it would re-write or remove history in your reports. When we keep the historical activity, we also keep the user record to tie that historic activity back to the user, department, or country from which they completed those actions. For this reason, our user records will often include those with participation for the duration of reporting, not just those who are employees today. *There are some exceptions affected by your opt-out settings and retention policy. Check our data protection guide for details. |
 | System AccountsNon-human accounts are playing an increasing role in M365, especially as organizations leverage tools for automation. To help organizations understand this mixing of automated tasks with human users, we include most System accounts, Service accounts, and Bots in our data. This means those accounts will also get their own record in the user table and even show up in visuals. |