While working with Azure Active Directory you will come across two concepts –

application objects & service principal objects.

When you register an Azure AD application in the Azure portal, these objects are created in your Azure AD tenant. About these two objects you can find more detailed information from this link – app-objects-and-service-principals

But this Microsoft document doesn’t talk about how and where to find these objects in Azure Portal. This article is attempt to provide this information.

 

When you register your Application in Azure Active Directory, it shows up like below-

 

Click on this Application to see more properties of it. Here you can notice the Application Id which is also referred as Client ID. Also note the Object ID.

 

If you copy this Application Id and go to Enterprise Applications and search you will get the same object there as well as shown below-

 

NOTE:- Application object is always shown under App registrations link and corresponding Service Principal object is shown in Enterprise applications link.

To confirm this follow the below steps-

In Azure Portal, Click on “cloud shell” icon to open PowerShell session.

 

Now run the command

Get-AzADApplication -DisplayName "<REPLACE your Web App Display Name>"

 

You will get result similar to shown below. You can see the ObjectType shown as “Application“.  Also notice that the Object ID matches with the one shown in screen 2. This confirms that Application object is created and shown in App registration link.

 

 

Now run the command to get service principal object

Get-AzADServicePrincipal -SearchString "<REPLACE your Web App Display Name>"

 

You will get result similar to shown below. You can see the ObjectType shown as “ServicePrincipal“.  Also notice that the Object ID matches with the one shown in PowerShell output. This confirms that Service Principal object is created and shown in Enterprise applications registration link.

 

 

I hope this clarifies that all objects shown in App registrations as Application Objects and all objects shown in Enterprise applications are Service principal objects.