Grafana Assistant relies on Grafana Cloud role-based access control (RBAC) so you can decide who can chat, run investigations, or administer tenant-wide settings. This article explains the roles available, the permissions they unlock, and how to grant users the access they need.
Before you begin
Organization administrator access: Only admins can assign Grafana Cloud roles.
RBAC plan: Decide which teams need chat, investigations, or administrative control.
Feature availability: Confirm you enabled Grafana Assistant and investigations in your stack.
Scope per stack: RBAC applies within a Grafana Cloud stack. Use plugins.app:access scoped to plugins:id:grafana-assistant-app to control who can open Assistant in that stack. To remove or disable the Assistant in a specific stack, contact Grafana Support.
Understand available roles
Grafana Cloud offers baseline organization roles plus Assistant-specific roles. Combining them lets you tailor access without granting more privileges than necessary.
Organization roles define broad access in Grafana Cloud:
Organization role
What the role can do with Grafana Assistant
Admin
Full access to Assistant chat, investigations, rules, and MCP server management.
Editor
Chat, investigations, and personal MCP server management.
Viewer
Read-only chat access.
No basic role
No Assistant access unless an administrator adds an Assistant-specific role.
Assistant-specific roles extend or restrict access regardless of the user’s organization role:
Assistant role
What the role unlocks
Assistant Admin
Administers tenant-wide Assistant settings, rules, and MCP servers in addition to chat.
Assistant MCP User
Uses Assistant chat and manages personal MCP servers and rules.
Assistant User
Basic Assistant chat plus personal rule management.
Assistant Investigation User
Launches and manages Assistant investigations.
Assign Assistant-specific roles to give targeted access to teammates who are not Editors or Admins.
Grant access in Grafana Cloud
Use the following procedures to grant the right level of access without over-provisioning.
Grant basic Assistant chat access
Sign in as an organization administrator.
Go to Administration > Users and access > Users.
Select the user and open the Role picker.
Choose Assistant > Assistant User.
Click Apply.
Allow users to launch investigations
Sign in as an organization administrator.
Navigate to Administration > Users and access > Users.
Select the user and open the Role picker.
Choose Assistant > Assistant Investigation User.
Click Apply.
Delegate Assistant administration
Sign in as an organization administrator.
Navigate to Administration > Users and access > Users.
Select the user and open the Role picker.
Choose Assistant > Assistant Admin.
Click Apply.
Users can hold multiple Assistant roles if they need both investigation access and tenant-wide configuration control.
Map permissions to actions
Each Assistant role grants a set of permissions. Use the tables below when you need to understand or audit the underlying RBAC settings.