Grant users access to secured resourcesedit
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.
APM Server users typically perform these main roles: they do the initial setup, publish monitoring information, and publish events. If they’re using Kibana, they view and sometimes create visualizations that access APM Server indices.
X-Pack security provides pre-built roles that grant some 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.
For privileges not granted by existing roles, create new roles. At a minimum, create a role for setting up APM Server, a role for publishing events, and a role for reading APM Server indices. Assign these new roles, along with the pre-built roles, to grant the full set of privileges required by APM Server users.
The following sections describe the privileges and roles required to perform specific job roles.
Privileges needed for initial setupedit
Users 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. The privileges required depend on the setup tasks users need to perform.
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.
| Task | Required privileges and roles |
|---|---|
Set up index templates |
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Set up ingest pipelines |
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Set up index lifecycle policies |
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Privileges needed to publish and view monitoring informationedit
X-Pack security provides the apm_system
built-in user and
apm_system built-in
role for sending monitoring information. You can use the built-in user, 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.
| Task | Required privileges and roles |
|---|---|
Send monitoring info |
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Use Stack Monitoring in Kibana to monitor APM Server |
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Privileges needed to publish eventsedit
Users who publish events to Elasticsearch need to create and read from APM Server indices. The privileges required for this role depend on the tasks users need to perform:
| Task | Required privileges and roles |
|---|---|
Send data to a secured cluster without index lifecycle management |
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also requires privileges to set up index templates
unless you’ve disabled automatic template loading: |
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Send data to a secured cluster that supports index lifecycle management |
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also requires privileges to set up index templates
unless you’ve disabled automatic template loading: |
Privileges needed by Kibana usersedit
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.
The privileges required for Kibana users depend on the tasks they need to perform:
| Task | Required privileges and roles |
|---|---|
Use the APM UI |
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Learn more about users and rolesedit
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