Create and assign feature roles to APM Server users

Note

Kibana custom roles are not compatible with Elastic Cloud Serverless.

Manage access on a feature-by-feature basis by creating several custom feature-related roles and assigning one or more of these roles to each user or group based on which features they need to access.

Tip

A role identifies a set of permissions that translates to privileges on resources. You can associate a user or group with an arbitrary number of roles. The total set of permissions that a user has is defined by the union of the permissions in all its roles.

In general, there are three types of privileges you’ll work with when creating roles:

  • Elasticsearch cluster privileges: Manage the actions a user can perform against your cluster.
  • Elasticsearch index privileges: Control access to the data in specific indices of your cluster.
  • Kibana space privileges: Grant users write or read access to features and apps within Kibana.

The following are common roles that APM Server users might need:

Example: Assigning multiple roles to an APM Server user

If you want to create an APM Server user who can use the Elastic APM Real User Monitoring (RUM) JavaScript Agent to ingest data from a frontend application and you use central configuration to manage APM agents, you would need to assign these three roles to the user:

Create a writer role ¶

APM users that publish events to Elasticsearch must have privileges to write to APM data streams.

Note

This is not needed when APM Server doesn’t write to Elasticsearch directly. For example, in some cases you may configure APM Server to write to another output like Logstash, Kafka, or any other output supported by libbeat. In these cases, different authentication credentials will need to be passed to apm-server.agent.config.elasticsearch.

To grant an APM Server user the required privileges for writing events to Elasticsearch:

  1. Create a general writer role, called something like apm_writer, that has the following privileges:
    Type Privilege Purpose
    Index auto_configure on traces-apm*, logs-apm*, and metrics-apm* indices Permits auto-creation of indices and data streams
    Index create_doc on traces-apm*, logs-apm*, and metrics-apm* indices Write events into Elasticsearch
    Cluster monitor Allows cluster UUID checks, which are performed as part of APM server startup preconditionsif Elasticsearch security is enabled (it is enabled by default), and allows a license check, which is required if tail-based sampling is enabled.

Note

If you have explicitly disabled Elastic security and you are not using tail-based sampling, the monitor privilege may not be necessary.

  1. Assign the general writer role to APM Server users who need to publish APM data.

Note

Assign additional APM feature roles to users as needed including the Central configuration management role, which is required in most cases.

Create a central configuration management role ¶

Important

The privileges included in this role are required for all users when central configuration management is enabled (it is enabled by default). You need this role unless central configuration management has been explicitly disabled in the Applications UI.


APM Server acts as a proxy between your APM agents and the Applications UI. The Applications UI communicates any changed settings to APM Server so that your agents only need to poll the Server to determine which central configuration settings have changed.

To create a role with the required privileges for managing central configuration in Elasticsearch without Kibana, you must use the Roles API (the required privileges can’t be assigned to a role in Kibana):

			POST /_security/role/apm_agentcfg
			{
 "description": "Allow APM Server to manage central configurations in Elasticsearch.",
 "indices": [
   {
     "names": [".apm-agent-configuration"],
     "privileges": ["read"],
     "allow_restricted_indices": true
   }
 ]
}

The previous privileges should be sufficient for APM agent central configuration to work properly as long as APM Server communicates with Elasticsearch successfully. If it fails, it may fallback to read agent central configuration through Kibana if configured, which requires the following privileges:

Type Privilege Purpose
Spaces Read on Applications UI Allow APM Server to manage central configurations via the Applications UI

Note

Assign additional APM feature roles to users as needed including the Writer role, which is required in most cases.

Tip

Looking for privileges and roles needed to use central configuration from the Applications UI or APM UI API? See Applications UI central configuration user.

Create a monitoring role ¶

Elasticsearch security features provides built-in users and roles for publishing and viewing monitoring data. The privileges and roles needed to publish monitoring data depend on the method used to collect that data.

Publish monitoring data ¶

Important

Elastic Cloud users: This section does not apply to our hosted Elasticsearch Service. Monitoring on Elastic Cloud is enabled by clicking the Enable button in the Monitoring panel.

Internal collection ¶

If you’re using internal collection to collect metrics about APM Server, either:

  • Use the built-in apm_system user or role
  • Create a custom role

Use a built-in user or role

Elasticsearch security features 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, create a user who has the built-in role assigned, or create a user and manually assign the privileges needed to send monitoring information.

If you use the built-in apm_system user, make sure you set the password before using it.

Create a custom role

If you don’t use the apm_system user, you can create a custom role:

  1. Create a monitoring role, called something like apm_monitoring_writer, that has the following privileges:
    Type Privilege Purpose
    Index create_index on .monitoring-beats-* indices Create monitoring indices in Elasticsearch
    Index create_doc on .monitoring-beats-* indices Write monitoring events into Elasticsearch
  2. Assign the monitoring role to APM Server users who need to write monitoring data to Elasticsearch.

Note

Assign additional APM feature roles to users as needed including the Writer role and Central configuration management role, both of which are required in most cases.

Metricbeat collection ¶

Note

When using Metricbeat to collect metrics, no roles or users need to be created with APM Server. See Use Metricbeat collection for complete details on setting up Metricbeat collection.

If you’re using Metricbeat to collect metrics about APM Server, you can either:

  • Use the built-in remote_monitoring_user user or role
  • Create a custom user

Use a built-in user or role

Elasticsearch security features 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 built-in remote_monitoring_user user, make sure you set the password before using it.

Create a custom user

If you don’t use the remote_monitoring_user user, you can create a custom user:

  1. Create a monitoring user on the production cluster who will collect and send monitoring information. Assign the following roles to the monitoring user:
    Role Purpose
    remote_monitoring_collector Collect monitoring metrics from APM Server
    remote_monitoring_agent Send monitoring data to the monitoring cluster

Note

Assign additional APM feature roles to users as needed including the Writer role and Central configuration management role, both of which are required in most cases.

View monitoring data ¶

To grant users the required privileges for viewing monitoring data:

  1. Create a monitoring role, called something like apm_monitoring_viewer, that has the following privileges:
    Type Privilege Purpose
    Spaces Read on Stack monitoring Read-only access to the Stack Monitoring feature in Kibana.
    Spaces Read on Dashboards Read-only access to the Dashboards feature in Kibana.
  2. Assign the monitoring role, along with the following built-in roles, to users who need to view monitoring data for APM Server:
    Role Purpose
    monitoring_user Grants access to monitoring indices for APM Server

Note

Assign additional APM feature roles to users as needed including the Writer role and Central configuration management role, both of which are required in most cases.

Create a source map role ¶


If real user monitoring is enabled, additional privileges are required to read source maps.

To grant an APM Server user with the required privileges for reading RUM source maps from Elasticsearch directly without Kibana, assign the user the following privileges:

Type Privilege Purpose
Index read on .apm-source-map index Allow APM Server to read RUM source maps from Elasticsearch

Note

Assign additional APM feature roles to users as needed including the Writer role and Central configuration management role, both of which are required in most cases.

The previous privileges should be sufficient for RUM source mapping to work properly as long as APM Server communicates with Elasticsearch successfully. If it fails, it may fallback to read source maps through Kibana if configured, which requires additional Kibana privileges. See RUM source map API for more details.