Single Sign-On (SSO) has become a popular choice for many web applications, allowing users to access multiple applications with a single login. It’s a powerful tool for improving user experience and streamlining authentication, especially for businesses with several connected systems. But as convenient as SSO is, monitoring web applications that rely on it can be a bit tricky. Let’s dive into the unique challenges SSO presents for monitoring and explore solutions that can help ensure a seamless experience for users.
What is Single Sign-On and Why?
Single Sign-On (SSO) is a user authentication method that enables people to access multiple, independent applications with just one set of login credentials. Imagine you log in once to access your company’s email, internal chat tool, CRM, and project management software without having to log in again for each individual service. That’s SSO in action.
The primary purpose of SSO is to simplify the user experience. By requiring only one login, SSO reduces the need to remember multiple passwords and cuts down on the hassle of re-authentication. This streamlined experience not only benefits end-users but also helps IT teams manage and secure access more effectively.
What are the Benefits?
SSO comes with several key benefits that make it attractive to organizations of all sizes:
- Enhanced User Experience: Users enjoy a seamless, uninterrupted experience, moving between applications without repeated logins.
- Improved Security: Centralized authentication reduces the risk of insecure or reused passwords. Plus, security features like multi-factor authentication (MFA) can be applied universally.
- Reduced Help Desk Requests: With fewer passwords to remember, users are less likely to get locked out or require password resets.
- Streamlined User Management: IT teams can centrally manage user access and permissions, making onboarding and offboarding employees easier.
While SSO improves security and user experience, it introduces new complexities in terms of monitoring application performance and user interactions.
Single Sign-On Traffic Movement
To understand the challenges of monitoring SSO, it’s helpful to look at how traffic moves in an SSO environment. When a user logs in through SSO, they’re first directed to an identity provider (IdP) such as Okta, Microsoft Azure AD, or Google Identity. Once authenticated, they receive a token that allows them to access various services without re-authenticating.
In a typical SSO flow, the following happens:
- Initial Login Request: The user attempts to access an application and is redirected to the IdP for authentication.
- Authentication: The IdP verifies the user’s credentials and, if successful, issues a token or cookie.
- Service Access: The user can then access the target application, which verifies the token before granting access.
- Subsequent Logins: For other SSO-connected applications, the same token is used to allow access without reauthentication.
This flow is convenient but adds complexity to monitoring since the process involves multiple steps, redirections, and token-based verifications across systems. Ensuring that each step functions properly becomes crucial, as an issue with the IdP or token verification can result in a total access breakdown.
Challenges in Monitoring Single Sign-On Traffic
Now, with all that we’ve covered about SSO, you’ll also want to monitor your application with different kind of APM tools. And here it gets tricky and challenging with the SSO-enabled traffic.
- When to initiate authentication check – Usually SSO apps will have multiple apps from multiple vendors in the product suite of an ecosystem. Users are unpredictable, so they will have a complex flows within the ecosystem. They will also have role-based access to some resources and apps. When you monitor such apps using traditional APM tools, it becomes difficult to figure out when you should prompt a credential checkpoint so that you know you are doing it correctly.
- Where to initiate authentication check – With SSO-enabled traffic, you need to establish a clear workflow when moving from one app to another app. These apps can be from the same vendor or different vendors. Apps from different vendors (cross-vendor movement) may require different sets of credentials for their SSO management. This can add another layer of complexity with SSO enabled traffic in a large enterprise infrastructure with multi-vendor SSO apps.
- After login flow – When using SSO, it is important that the application server is passing all the information required to continue with the flow after the login check is passed. When you come across any broken flow, you will need to figure out what caused it – SSO mechanism, a broken URL, expired session cookie, or missed params when the URL is passed.
- User attributes – User attributes are also an important factor in the SSO mechanism that adds complexity to monitoring the apps. Any failure can mean multiple things, from bad user attributes to no fetching at all. If the SSO server is not able to fetch user attributes correctly or pass on correctly after fetching, all subsequent flows will fail. And detecting where it went wrong will be a challenging task.
- Confusing and slow monitoring – Most of the time when using traditional APM tools, it becomes confusing where the actual problem is. If it is with the application itself, it seems like SSO is the culprit and vice-versa. This leads to a slow analysis of the monitoring logs and thus, slow detection of the problems and their resolutions.
So What’s the Solution?
Given these complexities, a thorough monitoring strategy is essential for ensuring SSO-enabled applications run smoothly. A successful strategy combines web application, web page, and web services monitoring to cover all aspects of SSO and ensure users can log in and navigate applications without issues.
1. Web Application Monitoring: Monitoring your entire application flow, from login to navigation, can help detect issues within the SSO authentication flow. If users experience delays or failures after SSO login, application monitoring can pinpoint where in the process the problem is occurring.
2. Web Page Monitoring: Web page monitoring checks specific pages for load speed, content rendering, and errors. For SSO-enabled applications, you’ll want to monitor key pages that follow the login process, such as the homepage or dashboard, to ensure users have immediate access after authentication.
3. Web Services Monitoring: SSO relies heavily on APIs to validate tokens and authenticate users. Web services monitoring allows you to track these APIs directly, ensuring that requests to your IdP and SSO-enabled applications are functioning correctly and performing as expected.
Dotcom-Monitor is an excellent choice for these monitoring needs, offering a robust suite of tools that cover web application, web page, and web services monitoring. Dotcom-Monitor’s synthetic monitoring solutions can simulate user login flows, test authentication paths, and monitor token-based interactions to identify any issues in the SSO process before they affect your users.
With Dotcom-Monitor’s solution, you gain several advantages:
- Proactive Identification of Authentication Issues: By monitoring the entire SSO authentication path, you can detect bottlenecks or failures in the login flow, whether at the IdP or the application level.
- Real-Time API Monitoring: Ensure your SSO-related APIs are always available and responsive, preventing access issues and maintaining a seamless user experience.
- Detailed Performance Insights: With Dotcom-Monitor’s page load and response time tracking, you can see how SSO impacts your application’s speed and pinpoint where latency may be introduced.
Keep in mind that SSO technology is also evolving with multi-factor authentication and other security challenges, so make sure you use a monitoring solution that can support the latest web application technologies and authentication protocols, like SSO. Try the web application monitoring solution from Dotcom-Monitor for free.
