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Mark Smith for Okta Workflows

Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at iamse.blog

Event Hook Filtering and Okta Workflows

Event Hooks are outbound calls from Okta, sent when specified events occur in your tenant. They take the form of HTTPS REST calls to a URL you specify, encapsulating information about the events in JSON objects in the request body. These calls from Okta are meant to be used as triggers for process flows within your own software systems. Okta defines the REST API contract for the requests that it will send. Event Hooks are Okta’s implementation of the industry concept of webhooks. Okta’s Event Hooks are related to, but different from Okta Inline Hooks. Event Hooks are meant to deliver information about events that occurred, not offer a way to affect execution of the underlying Okta process flow. Also, Event Hooks are asynchronous calls, meaning that the process flow that triggered the Event Hook continues without stopping or waiting for any response from your external service.

To handle Event Hook calls from Okta, you have two main options:

  1. Implement a web service with an Internet-accessible endpoint. It’s your responsibility to develop the code and to arrange its hosting on a system external to Okta. See this blog post for a Java example of how to code a web service endpoint: Password Import Hook with Java Endpoint

  2. Use Okta Workflows. Using workflows to handle these events is super easy as Okta provides an Out of the Box connector that will automatically receive each type of event. Your workflow can then be used to process the event as desired. Now that Event Hook Filters are available (currently in beta at the time of writing this post), we now have an alternative way to handle Okta Events in Workflows in a more performant way.

See the fill article here: event-hook-filtering-and-okta-workflows

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