Abstract: The disclosure herein describes monitoring authorization checks and detecting excess authorization privileges and other privilege usage patterns. An authorization check associated with an operation performed during a session in a computing environment is captured and a set of authorization privileges granted to a user of the session is identified. Based on comparison of the authorization privileges to authorization checks including the captured authorization check, excess authorization privileges granted to the user of the session is detected, wherein the excess authorization privileges are a subset of the identified set of authorization privileges. A privilege discrepancy notification based on the detected set of excess authorization privileges is generated. The detected privilege usage patterns described herein are used to improve the efficient use, and increase the security, of resources in the computing system.