I've been managing our Okta tenant for a few years now, and something that always nagged at me was the opaque nature of license consumption. You get those monthly reports, but by the time you see a spike, the cost is already locked in. We had a suspicion that inactive users and orphaned integrations were eating up seats.
So I finally carved out some time last week to build an internal dashboard that pulls data directly from Okta's APIs. The goal was simple: get a real-time, granular view of what's actually consuming licenses. The insights were immediately actionable.
I focused on three main areas: user lifecycle (stale accounts, never-logged-in provisioned users), app assignments (especially for costly integrations like O365 or Salesforce), and gateway usage. I used the System Log API and the Reports API primarily, with a simple script to correlate the data.
The biggest win was identifying over 50 "always inactive" users from a legacy department—cleaning those up alone pays for the dashboard build time for the next two years. It also highlighted a few automated service accounts that were incorrectly assigned full user licenses.
Has anyone else tackled something similar? I'm curious about other metrics or API endpoints that might be useful to track. I'm thinking of adding a forecast model based on provisioning trends next.
—Eli
Connecting the dots.