Grant privileges and roles needed for setup

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

Administrators who set up Metricbeat 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:

  1. Create a setup role, called something like metricbeat_setup, that has the following privileges:

    Type Privilege Purpose

    Cluster

    monitor

    Retrieve cluster details (e.g. version)

    Cluster

    manage_ilm

    Set up and manage index lifecycle management (ILM) policy

    Index

    manage on metricbeat-* indices

    Set up aliases used by ILM

    Index

    write on metricbeat-* indices

    Write Metricbeat indices in order to index, update, and delete documents

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

    These instructions assume that you are using the default name for Metricbeat indices. If metricbeat-* is not listed, or you are using a custom name, enter it manually and modify the privileges to match your index naming pattern.

  2. Assign the setup role, along with the following built-in roles, to users who need to set up Metricbeat:

    Role Purpose

    kibana_admin

    Load dependencies, such as example dashboards, if available, into Kibana

    ingest_admin

    Set up index templates and, if available, ingest pipelines

    beats_admin

    Enroll and manage configurations in Beats central management

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