Using Reporting with Shieldedit

Reporting operates by creating and updating documents in Elasticsearch in response to user interation in Kibana.

To use Reporting with Shield enabled, you need to set up Kibana to work with Shield. You also need to create a role that grants read access to the Reporting indices and assign this role to all users you want to allow to use Reporting.

Prior to 2.4.6, the reporting roles required the write privilege, and there wasn’t a reporting.roles.allow setting. It’s highly recommended to upgrade to 2.4.6 and remove the write privileges from the reporting roles.

Setting Up A Reporting Roleedit

Similar to how you added a my_kibana_user user role to roles.yml to allow users to use Kibana, you will need to create a role for those users to use Reporting as well.

Users will need both permissions to use the Reporting interface in Kibana

  1. Create a reporting_user role that assigns read privileges to the reporting indices:

    reporting_user:
      indices:
        - names: '.reporting-*'
          privileges:
            - read

    If you prefer, you can add the reporting index permissions to an existing role. However, this will require you add the role to the reporting.roles.allow setting as discussed below.

  2. If using a role name besides reporting_user, add the role to the reporting.roles.allow setting in your kibana.yml
  3. Assign the reporting_user and your Kibana user role to all users you want to allow to use Reporting.

    • If you’re using the default file realm, you can assign roles when you add a user, or modify the role assignments with the roles command. For example, the following command creates a user named billmurr and assigns the my_kibana_user and reporting_user roles:

      esusers useradd billmurr -r my_kibana_user,reporting_user -p password
    • If you are using an LDAP or Active Directory realm, you can either assign roles on a per user basis, or assign roles to groups of users. By default, role mappings are configured in config/shield/role_mapping.yml. For example, the following snippet assigns the user named Bill Murray to the my_kibana_user and reporting_user roles:

      my_kibana_user:
        - "cn=Bill Murray,dc=example,dc=com"
      reporting_user:
        - "cn=Bill Murray,dc=example,dc=com"