Let’s say you need to create a new global session policy in Okta to replace an outdated one, or to change something else in your tenant’s configuration.

The safe way of doing that involves building and testing a new policy in a preview environment before manually copying it to production–a process that, frankly, can eat up a lot of time and is prone to human error. A small mistake (e.g., an adjustment to a network zone) could lead to big issues, impacting important applications and business processes. 

Duplicating Okta configuration elements between tenants is rarely straightforward. Policies often depend on groups, network zones, and behaviors–to sufficiently test and understand the impact of your change, you need to first manually replicate your entire configuration in preview and then rebuild tested changes in production. 

In this blog post, I’ll share a quick and error-free way to sync your Okta preview and production, so you can move configurations between them without extra work and manual errors. 

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Sync your preview and promote changes using Salto

Salto is a configuration management platform for Okta and other SaaS applications that enables you to deploy changes quickly and safely. Salto presents a clear view of the differences between your tenants’ configurations, allowing you to select the desired changes, along with any necessary dependencies, and move them with a few clicks.

You can start a free 1-month trial (no credit card required) and try it for yourself. Let’s go over how exactly it works:

1. Connect and fetch your Okta tenants

Salto fetches your Okta configuration and displays it in a user-friendly view where you can manage it more easily:

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2. Compare environments and see the diffs

Next, select your source environment (in our case, your preview) and the target environment (in our case, production). ‍Now, you can see the full comparison of your preview and production, which is pretty valuable in and of itself. You should now also see the differences between those environments:

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3. Select changed elements and their dependencies

When you select elements you want to move between tenants, Salto automatically flags the necessary dependencies to include, ensuring a comprehensive and error-free deployment. Let’s find our global session policy in preview and select it:

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Now, you can see a few other elements under the “Missing Dependencies” tab that you have to deploy as well for your policy to function correctly. We selected them as well.

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4. Preview and deploy

In addition to reading your configuration, Salto can also ‘write’ them back to Okta–meaning that everything you selected above will be deployed to production. Review your changes and make sure there are no more missing dependencies (Salto will always notify you if something is missing). And we are good to go: 

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That’s pretty much it. Your new policy is now in production. And the change you made is also documented in Salto. 

You can deploy from production to preview in the same way, or if you have a hub-and-spokes implementation of Okta, you can sync a single element or a full configuration between multiple tenants. 

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Why Salto is better than the manual process

As you see, making changes via Salto is much faster and easier. But using Salto for configuration management is not only saving time for Okta admins but benefits the entire organization:

• Minimizing errors: Our automated dependency detection and promotion process slashes the likelihood of oversights and mistakes‍
• Documenting changes: Every change is auto-logged, creating a clear audit trail for reporting and compliance‍
• Enabling configuration backup and reverts: Because every change is documented and versioned, you can always go back–if something doesn't go as planned, reverting changes becomes straightforward and stress-free