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Documentation Grafana documentation Permissions Overview

Permissions Overview

Grafana users have permissions that are determined by their:

• Organization Role (Admin, Editor, Viewer)
• Via Team memberships where the Team has been assigned specific permissions.
• Via permissions assigned directly to user (on folders, dashboards, data sources)
• The Grafana Admin (i.e. Super Admin) user flag.

User

A user is a named account in Grafana. A user can belong to one or more organizations and can be assigned different levels of privileges through roles.

Grafana supports a wide variety of internal and external ways for users to authenticate themselves. These include from its own integrated database, from an external SQL server, or from an external LDAP server.

Grafana Admin

This admin flag makes user a Super Admin. This means they can access the Server Admin views where all users and organizations can be administrated.

Organization Roles

Users can belong to one or more organizations. A user’s organization membership is tied to a role that defines what the user is allowed to do in that organization. Grafana supports multiple organizations in order to support a wide variety of deployment models, including using a single Grafana instance to provide service to multiple potentially untrusted organizations.

In most cases, Grafana is deployed with a single organization.

Each organization can have one or more data sources.

All dashboards are owned by a particular organization.

Note: Most metric databases do not provide per-user series authentication. This means that organization data sources and dashboards are available to all users in a particular organization.

Refer to Organization roles for more information.

Dashboard and Folder Permissions

Dashboard and folder permissions allow you to remove the default role based permissions for Editors and Viewers and assign permissions to specific Users and Teams. Learn more about Dashboard and Folder Permissions.

Data source permissions

Per default, a data source in an organization can be queried by any user in that organization. For example a user with Viewer role can still issue any possible query to a data source, not just those queries that exist on dashboards he/she has access to.

Data source permissions allows you to change the default permissions for data sources and restrict query permissions to specific Users and Teams. Read more about data source permissions.