Create LBAC for data sources rules for the Loki data source

LBAC for data sources is available on Cloud for Loki data sources created with basic authentication. Managed/Provisioned Loki data source can NOT be configured with LBAC for data sources as of now.

Before you begin

To be able to use LBAC for data sources rules, you need to enable the feature toggle teamHttpHeaders on your Grafana instance. Contact support to enable the feature toggle for you.

Be sure that you have the permission setup to create a Loki tenant in Grafana Cloud.
Be sure that you have admin data source permissions for Grafana.
Be sure that you have a team setup in Grafana.

Create a LBAC for data sources Rule for a team

Navigate to your Loki data source
Navigate to the permissions tab
- Here, you’ll find the LBAC for data sources rules section.
Add a LBAC for data sources Rule
- Add a new rule for the team in the LBAC for data sources rules section.
Define a label selector for the rule
- Add a label selector to the rule. Refer to Loki query documentation for guidance on the types of log selections you can specify.

LBAC rule

A LBAC rule is a logql query that runs as a query to the Loki instance for your logs. Each rule operates independently as its own filter, separate from other rules within a team. For example, you can create a label policy that includes all log lines with a specific label.

One rule {namespace="dev", cluster="us-west-0"} created with multiple namespaces will be seen as namespace="dev" AND cluster="us-west-0". Two rules {namespace="dev"}, {cluster="us-west-0"} created for a team will be seen as namespace="dev" OR cluster="us-west-0".

Best practices

We recommend you only add query permissions for teams that should use the data source and only Admin have Admin permissions.

We recommend for a first setup, setting up as few rules as possible for each team and make them additive for simplicity.

To validate the rules, we recommend testing the rules in the Loki Explore view. This will allow you to see the logs that would be returned for the rule.

Tasks

Task 1: One rule set up for each team

One common use case for creating an LBAC policy is to have specific access to logs that have a specific label. For example, you can create a label policy that includes all log lines with the label.

We have two teams, Team A and Team B with Query permissions. Loki access is setup with Admin roles to have Admin permission only.

Team A has a rule namespace="dev".
Team B has a rule namespace="prod".

A user that is part of Team A will have access to logs that match namespace="dev".

A user that is part of Team B will have access to logs that match namespace="prod".

A user that is part of Team A and Team B will have access to logs that match namespace="dev" OR namespace="prod".

Task 2: Set up a rule to exclude a label for a team

One common use case for creating an LBAC policy is to exclude logs that have a specific label. For example, you can create a label policy that excludes all log lines with the label secret=true by adding a selector with secret!="true" when you create an access policy:

We have one team, Team A Query permissions. Loki access is setup with Admin roles to have Admin permission only.

Team A has a rule secret!="true".

A user that is part of Team A will NOT have access to logs that match secret!="true".

Task 3: Set up multiple rules for a team

We have two teams, Team A and Team B with Query permissions. Loki access is setup with Admin roles having Admin permission.

Team A has rule cluster="us-west-0", namespace=~"dev|prod" configured.
Team B has rule cluster="us-west-0", namespace="staging" configured.

A user that is only part of Team A will have access to logs that match cluster="us-west-0" AND (namespace="dev" OR namespace="prod").

A user that is only part of Team B will have access to logs that match cluster="us-west-0" AND namespace="staging".

A user in Team A has access to logs in cluster us-west-0 with namespaces dev and prod. A user in Team B has access to to everything in cluster us-west-0, except namespace prod. So basically, user who is member of both team A and team B has access to everything in cluster us-west-0.

A user that is not part of any Team with Editor/Viewer role will not have access to query any logs.

Important

A Admin user that is part of a Team with will only have access to that teams logs

A Admin user that is not part of any Team with Admin role will have access to all logs

Task 4: Rules that overlap

We have two teams, Team A and Team B.

Team A has a rule namespace="dev".
Team B has a rule namespace!="dev".

A user in Team A will have access to logs that match namespace="dev".

A user in Team B will have access to logs that match namespace!="dev".

NOTE: A user that is part of Team A and Team B will have access to all logs that match namespace="dev" OR namespace!="dev".

Task 5: Single rule setup for a team

We have two teams, Team A and Team B. Loki access is setup with Editor, Viewer roles to have Query permission.

Team A has a rule namespace="dev" configured.
Team B does not have a rule configured for it.

A user that is part of Team A will have access to logs that match namespace="dev".

A user that is part of Team A and part of Team B will have access to logs that match namespace="dev".

A user that is not part of Team A and part of Team B, that is Editor or Viewer will have access to all logs (due to the query permission for the user).