Concept
Understanding Scan Buckets and Parallel Scanning
Rencore Governance scans your Microsoft 365 tenant by running jobs against many different services — SharePoint, Teams, Power Platform, Azure AD, and so on. To keep scans fast and to avoid hitting Microsoft API throttling limits, those services are organised into scan buckets.
This page explains what scan buckets are, how parallel scanning works across them, and which services belong to which bucket by default.
Why Services Are Grouped Into Buckets
Different Microsoft 365 services share underlying APIs. SharePoint and OneDrive, for example, both call into the same SharePoint REST endpoints; Microsoft 365 and Teams both lean heavily on Microsoft Graph. If Rencore Governance scanned two services that share an API at the same time, both scans would compete for the same request quota, and Microsoft would start throttling them, making the scans slower than if they had simply run one after the other.
Scan buckets prevent that. A bucket is a group of services that should not run in parallel because they share resources. Services in different buckets can run at the same time without interfering with each other.
How Parallel Scanning Works
Rencore Governance schedules scans according to two rules:
- Only one service from any given bucket runs at a time.
- Services from different buckets can run in parallel.
So if “Microsoft 365”, “Power Apps”, and “OneDrive” are each in different buckets, all three can scan concurrently. But “Microsoft 365” and “Teams” — both in the same bucket — will scan one after the other, never simultaneously.
Services in Each Bucket
The default grouping is:
Bucket | Services |
|---|---|
1 | Microsoft 365, Teams, Azure AD, Planner |
2 | Power Apps, Power Automate |
3 | Power BI, Yammer, Exchange, Copilot Studio, Microsoft 365 Copilot |
4 | OneDrive, SharePoint |
5 | Azure |
Why This Matters For You
Understanding the bucket model helps in two situations:
- When you see scans running concurrently in the scan history and want to know why some combinations appear together and others don’t.
- When you’re estimating how long a full scan cycle takes across all enabled services in your tenant. Services in the same bucket scan sequentially, so the total time is driven by the slowest bucket, not by the sum of all individual scans.
- Knowing that a paused or running scan will block other scans in the same bucket until complete.