Grant users access to secured resources

You can use role-based access control to grant users access to secured resources. The roles that you set up depend on your organization’s security requirements and the minimum privileges required to use specific features.

Typically you need the create the following separate roles:

setup role for setting up index templates and other dependencies
monitoring role for sending monitoring information
writer role for publishing events collected by APM Server
reader role for Kibana users who need to view and create visualizations that access APM Server data

X-Pack security provides built-in roles that grant a subset of the privileges needed by APM Server users. When possible, use the built-in roles to minimize the affect of future changes on your security strategy.

Grant privileges and roles needed for setup

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Setting up APM Server is an admin-level task that requires extra privileges. As a best practice, grant the setup role to administrators only, and use a less restrictive role for event publishing.

Administrators who set up APM Server typically need to load mappings, dashboards, and other objects used to index data into Elasticsearch and visualize it in Kibana.

To grant users the required privileges:

Create a setup role, called something like apm_setup, that has the following privileges:

Type Privilege Purpose

Cluster

monitor

Retrieve cluster details (e.g. version)

Index

manage on apm-* indices

Set up aliases used by ILM

Omit any privileges that aren’t relevant in your environment.

These instructions assume that you are using the default name for APM Server indices. If you are using a custom name, modify the privileges to match your index naming pattern.

Assign the setup role, along with the following built-in roles, to users who need to set up APM Server:

Role	Purpose
`kibana_user`	Load dependencies, such as example dashboards, if available, into Kibana
`ingest_admin`	Set up index templates and, if available, ingest pipelines
`ingest_admin`	Set up ingest pipelines

Omit any roles that aren’t relevant in your environment.

Grant privileges and roles needed for monitoring

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X-Pack security provides built-in users and roles for monitoring. The privileges and roles needed depend on the method used to collect monitoring data.

Important note for Elastic Cloud users

Built-in users are not available when running our hosted Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud. To send monitoring data securely, create a monitoring user and grant it the roles described in the following sections.

If you’re using internal collection to collect metrics about APM Server, X-Pack security provides the apm_system built-in user and apm_system built-in role to send monitoring information. You can use the built-in user, if it’s available in your environment, or create a user who has the privileges needed to send monitoring information.

If you use the apm_system user, make sure you set the password.

If you don’t use the apm_system user:

Create a monitoring role, called something like apm_monitoring, that has the following privileges:

Type	Privilege	Purpose
Cluster	`monitor`	Retrieve cluster details (e.g. version)
Index	`create_index` on `.monitoring-beats-*` indices	Create monitoring indices in Elasticsearch
Index	`create_doc` on `.monitoring-beats-*` indices	Write monitoring events into Elasticsearch

Assign the monitoring role, along with the following built-in roles, to users who need to monitor APM Server:

Role Purpose

kibana_user

Use Kibana

monitoring_user

Use Stack Monitoring in Kibana to monitor APM Server

If you’re using Metricbeat to collect metrics about APM Server, X-Pack security provides the remote_monitoring_user built-in user, and the remote_monitoring_collector and remote_monitoring_agent built-in roles for collecting and sending monitoring information. You can use the built-in user, if it’s available in your environment, or create a user who has the privileges needed to collect and send monitoring information.

If you use the remote_monitoring_user user, make sure you set the password.

If you don’t use the remote_monitoring_user user:
1. Create a user on the production cluster who will collect and send monitoring information.
2. Assign the following roles to the user:
  
  Role Purpose
  
  remote_monitoring_collector
  
  Collect monitoring metrics from APM Server
  
  remote_monitoring_agent
  
  Send monitoring data to the monitoring cluster
3. Assign the following role to users who will view the monitoring data in Kibana:
  
  Role Purpose
  
  monitoring_user
  
  Use Stack Monitoring in Kibana to monitor APM Server

Role	Purpose
`kibana_user`	Use Kibana
`monitoring_user`	Use Stack Monitoring in Kibana to monitor APM Server

Role	Purpose
`remote_monitoring_collector`	Collect monitoring metrics from APM Server
`remote_monitoring_agent`	Send monitoring data to the monitoring cluster

Role	Purpose
`monitoring_user`	Use Stack Monitoring in Kibana to monitor APM Server

Grant privileges and roles needed for publishing

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Users who publish events to Elasticsearch need to create and write to APM Server indices. To minimize the privileges required by the writer role, use the setup role to pre-load dependencies. This section assumes that you’ve pre-loaded dependencies.

To grant the required privileges:

Create a writer role, called something like apm_writer, that has the following privileges:

The monitor cluster privilege and the create_doc privilege on apm-* indices are required in every configuration.

Type	Privilege	Purpose
Index	`create_doc` on `apm-*` indices	Write events into Elasticsearch
Index	`create_index` on `apm-*` indices	Create daily indices when connecting to clusters that do not support ILM. Not needed when using ILM.

Assign the writer role to users who will index events into Elasticsearch.

Grant privileges and roles needed to read APM Server data

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Kibana users typically need to view dashboards and visualizations that contain APM Server data. These users might also need to create and edit dashboards and visualizations.

To grant users the required privileges:

Assign the following built-in roles to users who need to read APM Server data:

Role Purpose

kibana_user and apm_user

Use the APM UI

admin

Read and update APM Agent configuration via Kibana

Role	Purpose
`kibana_user` and `apm_user`	Use the APM UI
`admin`	Read and update APM Agent configuration via Kibana

Learn more about users and roles

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Want to learn more about creating users and roles? See Securing the Elastic Stack. Also see:

Security privileges for a description of available privileges
Built-in roles for a description of roles that you can assign to users

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