Workflows system limits
There are Workflows best practices and system limits that can impact the design and success of your flow.
- Guidance for Workflows scale and performance
- Supported use cases
- Workflows platform limits
- Latency
- Hooks
- Automations
- Okta API
- Cell Support
Guidance for Workflows scale and performance
Okta Workflows is a powerful and flexible platform for automating identity processes. It's designed, tested, and optimized for a growing set of lifecycle management, data synchronization, and task automation use cases, and can be extended to do much more.
In this section, read about common use cases, important principles and limits to keep in mind when building flows, and how to ensure successful deployments.
As a Workflows customer, you'll be more successful when you perform these tasks:
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Understand supported use cases. See Supported use cases.
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Build flows using best practices and strong architecture. See Best practices for building flows.
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Understand the system's hard limits. See Workflows platform limits.
Supported use cases
While Workflows can do many things, it's optimized for a specific set of identity-related tasks. These are documented in both our help center and within Workflows using various resources.
Use cases |
Templates |
Connectors |
---|---|---|
Workflows is optimized and tested for a set of core workforce identity and customer identity use cases. |
Okta develops and curates an expanding library of importable templates. These are reviewed by Okta before they're released. |
Okta maintains a large set of native SaaS connectors that include easy API connectivity, improved usability and documentation, and optimizations such as built-in backoff and retry. See Connectors. |
Use cases can be classified approximately within three zones.
Green Zone |
Yellow Zone |
Red Zone |
---|---|---|
These use cases are well tested and supported:
|
These use cases require careful attention to architecture and best practices, and have a higher risk of running into system limits or other caveats. Support is provided on a best effort basis and working with professional services is recommended to ensure success.
Common challenges in this area include:
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These use cases aren't currently supported:
|
Workflows platform limits
Category |
Title |
Limit |
Description |
---|---|---|---|
Flows
|
Number of active flows per Org | Varies per plan |
An admin is allowed to run a maximum number of active flows according to these tiers:
Flows that are turned off aren't counted against the limit. The limit is configurable on a per-org basis. See Flow limits. If you have a legacy Workflows entitlement (for example, from Advanced Lifecycle Management), then you're limited to 100 active parent flows. |
Number of flows in an exported folder |
Varies per plan |
Using the Export Flow function card, the maximum number of flows that you can export is determined by your Workflows subscription plan. Your organization’s available export capacity is reset every 15 minutes. To perform a successful export, the number of exported flows can't exceed the assigned limit. Otherwise, the export fails in its entirety, and no flows will be exported. Flow limits don't apply to exports that are performed using the Workflows Export dialog. |
|
Flow Executions |
Workflows instance memory limit |
100 MB |
Limit on the instance variables that are stored in a flow as part of its execution. |
Maximum pause duration |
30 days |
The amount of time that a flow can be paused as it waits for a person's or a system's response before it terminates. |
|
Maximum steps per flow |
2 million |
The maximum number of steps that can be executed in a flow. |
|
Rate limit for flow executions |
10 invocations per second per flow |
There are different limits for event and inline hook delivery (see following tables). However, if you're invoking a flow directly from the API, there's a limit of 10 invocations per second per flow. Once that limit is exceeded, a 429 response code occurs. |
|
Recursion limit |
250 |
The maximum number of times a helper flow can call itself. Flows that exceed this limit will encounter the following error message: Stack limit exceeded. |
|
Payload limit | 1 MB |
If any single message in the Flow History exceeds 1 MB in size, then it will not be stored. The entry in the output field is replaced with the following message: The data returned successfully, but is too large to display. ![]() Despite the message, no error has occurred. There's no impact on the success of the flow, and the data will still be operated on as expected. |
|
Flow Files |
Attachments |
10 MB |
The size limit on files inside flows for attachments used in action cards such as the Send Email with Attachment action card for the Gmail connector. |
Downloads and uploads |
2 GB |
The size limit on files inside flows from download or upload action cards, such as:
|
|
Retention |
30 days |
The maximum amount of time that any file can be stored in the Workflows file system. |
|
Flow History | Data time to live | 30 days | The time limit on flow Execution history that appears in the Workflows Designer console. |
Flow Tables |
Number of tables |
100 |
The number of tables available in an org. This limit is configurable on a per-org basis. |
Row limits |
100,000 |
The maximum number of rows in a table. You can't add a row to a table after you've reached the limit. |
|
Column limits |
256 |
The maximum number of columns in a table. You can't add a column to a table after you've reached the limit. |
|
Cell limits |
16 KB |
The size limit of a single Workflows table cell. If you update a table cell with an input that is larger than the limit, an error will be returned. |
|
Cell character limits |
16,000 |
Limit on the number of characters in a table cell. |
|
API |
Timeout |
60 seconds |
For an incoming HTTP connection to an API Endpoint that invokes a synchronous flow, the amount of time it waits before terminating the connection. However, the flow itself won't be terminated. |
API Endpoints |
File payload size |
100 MB total, 25 MB per part |
For an HTTP multipart request, the maximum payload size is 100 MB. For each part (file, text, password, media, and so forth), the limit is 25 MB. |
Latency
Workflows doesn't guarantee execution latency. Usually flows run very fast. However, Workflows is a multi-tenant system and doesn't have a latency SLA.
Flows execution times depend on:
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Complexity of the flow (including built-in waits)
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Lag between increased demand for system resources and Okta adding extra capacity
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Latency or rate limiting by third-party APIs
Because specific latency can't be guaranteed, Workflows shouldn't be used in any flows where execution time is critical to the scenario, such as token enrichment or customizing authorization decisions.
Hooks
There are limits on Okta events that are used to trigger flows.
Neither event hook delivery nor flow execution order is guaranteed. It's a fully asynchronous environment. It's important to consider that concurrent events could be fired for a single user, and the state of a user may have changed since the event was fired. For example, a user may have been deactivated accidentally and then immediately reactivated. A flow that responds to the deactivation event may run either before or after the reactivation event. Similarly, the user may no longer be deactivated by the time the deactivation flow runs.
There are some more complex considerations. In exceptional cases, like an infrastructure failover, Okta may process some requests in a read-only mode until the failover is complete. That means that an event may fire for a process that can't complete. The best example is one that isn't currently supported by the Workflow product: Password import inline hook. It's possible for that hook to fire, but the password isn't imported because of the read-only mode. Listeners shouldn’t delete the user password from a legacy system until they see a successful user.import.password event and not assume that the hook firing was sufficient.
Feature |
Limit Type |
Limit |
Description |
---|---|---|---|
Event hooks |
Timeout |
3 seconds |
Okta event hooks have a completion timeout of three seconds with a single retry. A request isn't retried if your endpoint returns a 4xx HTTP error code. Any 2xx code is considered successful, and thus the request isn't retried. If the external service endpoint responds with a redirect, it isn't followed. |
Number of daily event hooks | 200,000 |
A max of 200,000 Event Hooks can be fired per org per day. Event hooks aren't recorded or replayed after this point. Outside of hitting the daily limit, Workflows event hooks are retried up to a certain time limit. |
|
Maximum number of event hooks per org |
10 |
A maximum of 10 active Event Hooks can be configured per org. Each event hook can be configured to deliver multiple event types. |
|
Maximum number of event hooks events per payload |
100 events |
A maximum of 100 events can be grouped with each event hook payload. Each event hook can be configured to deliver multiple event types. |
|
Inline hooks
|
Timeout |
3 seconds |
Okta inline hooks have a completion timeout of three seconds with a single retry. A request isn't retried if your endpoint returns a 4xx HTTP error code. Any 2xx code is considered successful, and thus the request isn't retried. If the external service endpoint responds with a redirect, it isn't followed. |
Maximum number of inline hooks per org |
50 |
The maximum number of inline hooks that can be configured per org is 50. This is a combined total for any combination of inline hook types. |
For more guidelines, see Event Hooks and Inline Hooks.
Automations
Okta automations enable you to prepare and respond to situations that occur during the lifecycle of end users assigned to an Okta group.
Category |
Title |
Limit |
Description |
---|---|---|---|
Automations
|
Maximum number of automations per org | 50 |
The maximum number of combined active and inactive automations for your org is 50. |
Maximum number of groups per automation |
10 |
The maximum number of groups per automation is 10. |
|
Maximum number of users per automation |
1 million |
The maximum number of total summed users included in the group membership applied to a single automation can't exceed 1 million. When automations are set up with multiple groups, the user count is incremented each time a user is added to a group. When the total number of users exceeds 1 million, the automation doesn't run and an event is logged in the System log. |
For more guidelines, see Automations.
Okta API
The Okta API has specific per-org rate limits that apply to all actions taken by Workflows. These rate limits vary by endpoint and pricing plan, but are shared between Workflows actions and actions from external apps. For more information, see Rate Limits.
If you have a custom integration using the Okta API and are also experimenting with new Workflows development, you can exceed your Okta rate limit and disrupt both activities. It's recommended to develop new flows in a preview environment to avoid these issues. If disruptions do occur, pause any new flow until the rate limit rests in the next minute.
Cell Support
Workflows is available for North America, EU, and Asia Pacific/Japan (APJ) production and preview cells.
Customers must purchase the Regulated Community Cloud Cell and execute Okta's Business Associate Agreement (BAA) to send or store in Okta Workflows any protected health information, personal heath data, or other sensitive data that is subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Okta Workflows isn't covered under Okta’s FedRAMP authorization package regardless of cell.