Usage telemetry that shows how identities actually interact with applications and entitlements. It gives identity teams an evidence layer for certification, role design, and access reduction because it turns abstract entitlement ownership into observable behaviour across the environment.
Expanded Definition
Activity insights are behavioural telemetry for identities, showing which applications, APIs, and entitlements are actually used over time. In NHI and IAM programmes, that evidence layer helps distinguish intended access from dormant, excessive, or mis-scoped access, which is critical when the identity is an API key, service account, workload, or agent. Unlike static entitlement inventories, activity insights describe real execution patterns and can reveal whether access is routine, seasonal, anomalous, or never exercised.
Definitions vary across vendors on how much telemetry is required before something qualifies as an activity insight platform. NHI Management Group treats the term as a governance capability, not just a log feed, because the value comes from turning raw events into decisions about certification, role design, and access reduction. That makes it closely aligned with NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 concepts around continuous monitoring and access control. The most common misapplication is treating simple audit logs as activity insights, which occurs when teams collect events but never correlate them to identity ownership, entitlement scope, or actionability.
Examples and Use Cases
Implementing activity insights rigorously often introduces telemetry, storage, and interpretation overhead, requiring organisations to weigh better access decisions against the cost of collecting and analysing more identity data.
- During access reviews, identity teams use observed API calls to confirm whether a service account still needs production database access or whether the entitlement can be removed.
- For role design, patterns from repeated application usage help separate stable operational access from one-off exception access, improving RBAC mapping and reducing entitlement drift.
- In NHI governance, activity insights can show that a token exists but has not been exercised for months, supporting decommissioning and rotation decisions. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs notes that only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.
- For agentic systems, activity insights help distinguish intended tool use from unexpected execution paths, which is important when an AI agent has broad orchestration authority.
- When paired with standards guidance from NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, teams can align telemetry with continuous monitoring and reduce overreliance on annual certifications.
In practice, the strongest use cases are not forensic afterthoughts but repeatable evidence for entitlement cleanup, ownership validation, and exception expiry.
Why It Matters in NHI Security
Activity insights matter because NHI risk is usually hidden inside routine machine-to-machine behaviour. Without observable usage, teams cannot tell the difference between necessary standing access and entitlement sprawl, and that gap feeds excessive privilege, stale credentials, and weak certification outcomes. NHI Management Group data shows that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, while 80% of identity breaches involved compromised non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys. Activity insights help reduce that exposure by showing which identities are actually active and which are merely accumulating risk.
This is especially important because many organisations still store secrets outside proper controls, creating access paths that are difficult to govern end to end. The Ultimate Guide to NHIs also reports that 71% of NHIs are not rotated within recommended time frames, which makes accurate usage evidence even more valuable when deciding what to renew, revoke, or redesign. Organisational maturity improves when activity insights are used alongside policy and inventory data rather than as a standalone dashboard. Organisations typically encounter the need for activity insights only after a privilege review, incident, or access dispute exposes that nobody can prove whether an identity still needs what it can do.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0 and NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-04 | Activity visibility supports detection of dormant and excessive NHI access. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | DE.CM-01 | Continuous monitoring relies on operational telemetry to detect identity behaviour changes. |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | PR.AC-4 | Zero Trust requires ongoing access evaluation based on observed behaviour and least privilege. |
Use telemetry to prove actual use, then remove unused NHI privileges and tighten certification.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- How should security teams monitor AI agent activity without disrupting developers?
- How can SOC teams use identity context to improve response to agent activity?
- What is the difference between activity metrics and risk metrics in IAM?
- How can organisations tell legitimate automation from compromised service account activity?
Deepen Your Knowledge
Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on June 25, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group — the #1 independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org
