So I have tried all of the below, and used to use them regularly in the past but recently they have been a pain. The skip entitlements one usually works a treat but I would say its 10/100% when it does work.
Am I doing this wrong. I would say 90% of the time I get an error saying that the source is in use and legit there is nothing happen in my environment or the source connectors. Its really quite painful and so often we have to delete the entire source, to re-create it to get the same as you can imagine is not ideal.
Are you having this behavior in an unused tenant where you are sure there is no activity happening? With how embedded sources are, even general user activity could prevent a source from resetting. I would imagine resetting a source is something you would only do infrequently in the first place though.
Its our production tenant. Well its difficult for us. Sometimes we are required to wipe accounts and entitlements because we setup the Account schema wrong on the first time round. And so the easiest way for us to re-configure something like that is to wipe and reconfigure versus deleting the source and creating a new one. It used to work quite well in the past but it has certainly got a lot worse recently and the error message is always the same, whereas its referring to the source being in use and saying that it has a the same owner on multiple sources.
I would state, that I have tried changing the source owner to someone unique and not used anywhere and the error message repeats and still thinks the owner exists on multiple sources which it absolutely does not. Its very odd.
Now with you mentioning the error pointing to source owner and not about activity going on in tenant, here’s the problem.
When you try to reset source, it removes all accounts from that system so if you have any account from that source which is connected to identity which is owner of any other source then it would give this error.
e.g.
Ad admin: Chirag
SAP admin: Himanshu
Blackline admin: Rory
Gsuite Admin: Bitoshok
JIRA has accounts for Bitoshok and Rory in it(their identity has account in JIRA) and you are trying to reset JIRA accounts then it would error out. It would give list of sources also in response.
Solution
Go into those identities and manually remove their JIRA account from accounts(next aggregation would correlate it anyway) and this should let you reset the source.