Let us look at some of the search queries that are typical of searching the logs of identity provider:  

1) Query to report on callers from different origins - The Login screen for the identity provider may be visited from different domains. The count of requests from each of these origins can be easily found by looking for the referrer domains and adding a count for each occurrence.  

  

2) Determine users who used two step verification and their success rate - The growth in popularity of one-time passcodes over captcha and other challenge questions could be plotted on a graph as a trend by tagging the requests that performed these operations. One of the reasons one-time passcodes are popular is that unlike other forms they have less chance of going wrong. The user is guaranteed to get a fresh code and the code will successfully authenticate the user. OTP is used in many workflows for this purpose. 

3) Searching for login attempts - The above scenario also leads us to evaluate the conditions where customers did end up re-attempting where the captcha or their interaction on the page did not work. The hash of failures and their counts will determine which of these is a significant source of error. One of the outcomes of this is that we may discover some forms of challenges as not suitable for the user. In these cases, it is easier to migrate the user to other workflows. 

  

4) Modifications made to account state - Some of the best indicators of fraudulent activity is the pattern of access of account state whether it is to read or write. For example, the address, zip code and payment methods of the account change less frequently than the password for the user. If these do change often for a user and from different source, they may lead to fraud detection.  

Logs, clickstreams and metrics are only some of the ways to gain insight into customer activities related to their identity. While there may be other ways, identity provides a unique perspective to any holistic troubleshooting.  

Identity also provides boundless possibilities for analysis as a data source.