Grant users access to secured resources
editGrant users access to secured resources
editYou 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 Heartbeat
- reader role for Kibana users who need to view and create visualizations that access Heartbeat data
X-Pack security provides built-in roles that grant a subset of the privileges needed by Heartbeat 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
editSetting up Heartbeat 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 Heartbeat 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
heartbeat_setup
, that has the following privileges:Privileges Why needed? monitor
Send monitoring data to the cluster
manage_ilm
Set up and manage index lifecycle management (ILM) policy
manage
onheartbeat-*
indicesSet 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 Heartbeat 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 Heartbeat:
Roles Why needed? kibana_user
Load dependencies, such as example dashboards, if available, into Kibana
ingest_admin
Set up index templates and, if available, ingest pipelines
Omit any roles that aren’t relevant in your environment.
Grant privileges and roles needed for monitoring
editX-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 Heartbeat, X-Pack security provides the
beats_system
built-in user andbeats_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
beats_system
user, make sure you set the password.If you don’t use the
beats_system
user:-
Create a monitoring role, called something like
heartbeat_monitoring
, that has the following privileges:Privileges Why needed? monitor
Send monitoring info
kibana_user
Use Kibana
-
Assign the monitoring role, along with the following built-in role, to users who need to monitor Heartbeat:
Role Why needed? monitoring_user
Use Stack Monitoring in Kibana to monitor Heartbeat
-
-
If you’re using Metricbeat to collect metrics about Heartbeat, X-Pack security provides the
remote_monitoring_user
built-in user, and theremote_monitoring_collector
andremote_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:- Create a user on the production cluster who will collect and send monitoring information.
-
Assign the following roles to the user:
Role Why needed? remote_monitoring_collector
Collect monitoring metrics from Heartbeat
remote_monitoring_agent
Send monitoring data to the monitoring cluster
- Assign the following role to users who will view the monitoring data in Kibana:
Role Why needed? monitoring_user
Use Stack Monitoring in Kibana to monitor Heartbeat
Grant privileges and roles needed for publishing
editUsers who publish events to Elasticsearch need to create and read from Heartbeat indices. To minimize the privileges required by the writer role, you can use the setup role to pre-load dependencies. Then turn off setup options in the Heartbeat config file before running Heartbeat to publish events. For example:
To grant the required privileges:
-
Create a writer role, called something like
heartbeat_writer
, that has the following privileges (this list assumes the setup options shown earlier are set tofalse
):Privileges Why needed? monitor
Send monitoring info
read_ilm
Read the ILM policy when connecting to clusters that support ILM
view_index_metadata
onheartbeat-*
indicesCheck for alias when connecting to clusters that support ILM
index
onheartbeat-*
indicesIndex events into Elasticsearch
create_index
onheartbeat-*
indicesCreate daily indices when connecting to clusters that do not support ILM
Omit any privileges that aren’t relevant in your environment.
- Assign the writer role to users who will index events into Elasticsearch.
Grant privileges and roles needed to read Heartbeat data
editKibana users typically need to view dashboards and visualizations that contain Heartbeat data. These users might also need to create and edit dashboards and visualizations.
To grant users the required privileges:
-
Create a reader role, called something like
heartbeat_reader
, that has the following privilege:Privilege Why needed? read
onheartbeat-*
indicesRead data indexed by Heartbeat
-
Assign the reader role, along with the following built-in roles, to users who need to read Heartbeat data:
Roles Why needed? kibana_user
orkibana_dashboard_only_user
Use Kibana.
kibana_dashboard_only_user
grants read-only access to dashboards.Omit any roles that aren’t relevant in your environment.
Learn more about users and roles
editWant 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