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Programmatic access uses an API key, created from API Keys in the sidebar. There are two kinds: organization keys, which you’ll normally use, and personal keys, for quick testing.

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Organizations

Everything in OpenLens belongs to an organization — it owns your projects, data, seats, and billing. When you sign up you get your own. You can invite people into it — teammates to work alongside you, clients to view their own dashboards — or join someone else’s if they invite you. Access to a project is always granted within its organization.

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Organization keys

An organization key is the standard way to work with an organization’s projects programmatically. It belongs to the organization itself — a service account, not tied to any person, so it keeps working as people join or leave. Use one for scripts, agents, reporting pipelines, a Slack bot, or a warehouse sync — anything that reads or writes your projects. Only owners and admins can create or see organization keys. Because the key can read and write every project in the organization, it’s limited to the roles that already have full-organization access — members and clients are scoped to just their assigned projects, so an org-wide key would over-grant them. See roles and access for the full breakdown. An organization key can’t govern the organization (no inviting members, changing roles, billing, or minting other keys), and it never holds a seat.
Minting keys for others. Give each integration or teammate its own named key (for example CI or Sarah's reporting script) instead of sharing one. Every key has a last-used time and can be revoked on its own, so you can see which key is active and cut off a single source without disturbing the rest. Actions are attributed to the key, not to a person — a key shared between people can’t be traced back to an individual.

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Personal keys

A personal key acts as you and is meant for quick testing of the API from your own account. For real work with an organization’s projects, use an organization key. Any signed-in user can create one.

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Creating a key

  1. Open API Keys in the sidebar.
  2. Name the key (e.g. “CI integration”, “Slack bot”) and pick the scope. Anyone can create a personal key; only owners and admins can choose organization scope. A member or client who needs an organization key should ask an owner or admin.
  3. Pick an expiry. Never, 30, 90, or 180 days.
  4. Copy the secret immediately. It’s shown exactly once. Lose it and you revoke and re-create.
Then send it on every request:
The full walkthrough, from key to first visibility score, is in the API reference.

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MCP and your organization

The MCP server uses OAuth, so there’s no key to copy. When your agent connects, the session binds to your active organization, and the agent can do whatever your role allows: an owner’s agent manages everything, a member’s agent works its assigned projects, a client’s agent reads its one dashboard. API and MCP calls are metered per org per month, with allowances that scale by plan. The Usage page shows where you stand, and GET /api/me/limits returns the same numbers programmatically.