Security and access controls

Grafana Agent Observability enforces security at multiple layers: tenant isolation at the API level, authentication on SDK connections, RBAC in the Grafana plugin, and a proxy boundary between the plugin and the Agent Observability backend.

Understand tenant isolation

Every API request requires a tenant identifier in the X-Scope-OrgID header. Agent Observability enforces strict tenant boundaries. Generation data is scoped to the tenant that exported it. Query APIs return only data for the authenticated tenant. Evaluation rules and scores are tenant-scoped. There is no cross-tenant data access.

When SIGIL_AUTH_ENABLED is true (the default), Agent Observability rejects requests without a tenant header with 401 Unauthorized (HTTP) or Unauthenticated (gRPC).

Choose an SDK authentication mode

SDKs authenticate using one of four modes. For production deployments, use basic (Grafana Cloud) or bearer (custom proxy) mode.

Mode	Use case
`none`	Local development only — no authentication.
`tenant`	Self-hosted with tenant header injection.
`bearer`	Proxy-based authentication with bearer tokens.
`basic`	Grafana Cloud with instance ID and API key.

Configure plugin RBAC

The Grafana Agent Observability plugin defines five roles with increasing permissions. Assign roles through Grafana’s RBAC system to control who can view, annotate, and configure Agent Observability.

Role	Access
Sigil Viewer	Landing page and tutorial.
Sigil Data Reader	Dashboards, traces, model cards, and evaluation results without conversation access.
Sigil Reader	Conversations, dashboards, traces, agents, and evaluation results.
Sigil Feedback Writer	All Reader permissions plus feedback writing.
Sigil Admin	Full access including creating and configuring evaluators, evaluation rules, guards, and settings.

Only the Sigil Admin role can create or modify evaluators, evaluation rules, guards, and experiments. All other roles with data access can view evaluation results but cannot change evaluation or guard configuration.

Understand the plugin proxy boundary

The Grafana plugin communicates with the Agent Observability backend through a proxy that injects the tenant header from the Grafana user’s organization context, forwards only allowed API paths, enforces plugin-level RBAC before proxying requests, and doesn’t expose the Agent Observability API directly to end users.

Use health endpoints

The /healthz and /readyz endpoints are unauthenticated and don’t expose tenant data. They return only service health status.

Secure operational endpoints

/metrics and the /debug/pprof/ subtree (Go pprof plus godeltaprof delta_heap, delta_block, delta_mutex) are exposed unauthenticated on the same HTTP port. Restrict them at the gateway or network layer in deployments where they mustn’t be reachable by end users. Agent Observability doesn’t register /debug/pprof/cmdline, so the endpoint doesn’t expose process arguments. Profile payloads can include strings that were on the heap, for example, tenant data, in-flight requests, or credentials loaded at startup. Treat the subtree as privileged.