Deprecation Note

We published the last version of Graylog Documentation before the release of Graylog 4.2. Now, all documentation and help content for Graylog products are available at https://docs.graylog.org/.

There will be no further updates to these pages as of October 2021.

Do you have questions about our documentation? You may place comments or start discussions about documentation here: https://community.graylog.org/c/documentation-campfire/30

Roles

In Graylog, roles are named collections of individual permissions which can be assigned to users. Previous Graylog versions could only assign individual permissions to each user in the system, making updating stream or dashboard permissions for a large group of users difficult to deal with.

Starting with Graylog 1.2 you can create roles which bundle permissions to streams and dashboards. These roles can then be assigned to any number of users and later be updated to include new streams and dashboards.

../../_images/roles.png

The two roles Admin and Reader are built in and cannot be changed. The Admin role grants all permissions and should only be assigned to users operating Graylog. The Reader role grants the basic permissions every user needs to be able to use Graylog. The interface will ensure that every user at least has the Reader role in addition to more business specific roles you create.

Roles cannot be deleted as long as users are still assigned to them to prevent accidentally locking users out.

Creating a role

In order to create a new role, choose the green Add new role button on the System / Authentication / Roles page.

This will display a dialog allowing you to describe the new role and select the permissions it grants.

../../_images/create_role_1.png

After naming the role, select the permissions you want to grant using the buttons to the right of the respective stream or dashboard names. For each stream or dashboard you can select whether to grant edit or read permissions, but note that edit permissions always imply read permissions as well.

In case you have many streams or dashboards you can use the filter to narrow the list down, and use the checkboxes on the left hand side of the table to select multiple items. You can then use the bulk action buttons on the right hand side to toggle the permissions for all of the selected items at once.

../../_images/create_role_2.png

Once you are done, be sure to save your changes. The save button is disabled until you select at least one permission.

Editing a role

Administrators can edit roles to add or remove access to new streams and dashboards in the system. The two built in Admin and Reader roles cannot be edited or deleted because they are vital for Graylog’s permission system.

Simply choose the Edit button on the System / Authentication / Roles page and change the settings of the role in the following page:

../../_images/edit_role.png

You can safely rename the role as well as updating its description, the existing role assignment for users will be kept.

Deleting a role

Deleting roles checks whether a role still has users assigned to it, to avoid accidentally locking users out. If you want to remove a role, please remove it from all users first.