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Elastic Docs ›Heartbeat Reference [7.4] ›Securing Heartbeat ›Configure Heartbeat to use X-Pack security

Grant users access to secured resources

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Grant users access to secured resources

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You can use role-based access control to grant users access to secured resources. The roles that you set up depend on your organization’s security requirements and the minimum privileges required to use specific features.

Typically you need the create the following separate roles:

  • setup role for setting up index templates and other dependencies
  • monitoring role for sending monitoring information
  • writer role for publishing events collected by Heartbeat
  • reader role for Kibana users who need to view and create visualizations that access Heartbeat data

X-Pack security provides built-in roles that grant a subset of the privileges needed by Heartbeat users. When possible, use the built-in roles to minimize the affect of future changes on your security strategy.

Grant privileges and roles needed for setup

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Setting up Heartbeat is an admin-level task that requires extra privileges. As a best practice, grant the setup role to administrators only, and use a less restrictive role for event publishing.

Administrators who set up Heartbeat typically need to load mappings, dashboards, and other objects used to index data into Elasticsearch and visualize it in Kibana.

To grant users the required privileges:

  1. Create a setup role, called something like heartbeat_setup, that has the following privileges:

    Privileges Why needed?

    monitor

    Send monitoring data to the cluster

    manage_ilm

    Set up and manage index lifecycle management (ILM) policy

    manage on heartbeat-* indices

    Set up aliases used by ILM

    Omit any privileges that aren’t relevant in your environment.

    These instructions assume that you are using the default name for Heartbeat indices. If you are using a custom name, modify the privileges to match your index naming pattern.

  2. Assign the setup role, along with the following built-in roles, to users who need to set up Heartbeat:

    Roles Why needed?

    kibana_user

    Load dependencies, such as example dashboards, if available, into Kibana

    ingest_admin

    Set up index templates and, if available, ingest pipelines

    Omit any roles that aren’t relevant in your environment.

Grant privileges and roles needed for monitoring

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X-Pack security provides built-in users and roles for monitoring. The privileges and roles needed depend on the method used to collect monitoring data.

Important note for Elastic Cloud users

Built-in users are not available when running our hosted Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud. To send monitoring data securely, create a monitoring user and grant it the roles described in the following sections.

  • If you’re using internal collection to collect metrics about Heartbeat, X-Pack security provides the beats_system built-in user and beats_system built-in role to send monitoring information. You can use the built-in user, if it’s available in your environment, or create a user who has the privileges needed to send monitoring information.

    If you use the beats_system user, make sure you set the password.

    If you don’t use the beats_system user:

    1. Create a monitoring role, called something like heartbeat_monitoring, that has the following privileges:

      Privileges Why needed?

      monitor

      Send monitoring info

      kibana_user

      Use Kibana

    2. Assign the monitoring role, along with the following built-in role, to users who need to monitor Heartbeat:

      Role Why needed?

      monitoring_user

      Use Stack Monitoring in Kibana to monitor Heartbeat

  • If you’re using Metricbeat to collect metrics about Heartbeat, X-Pack security provides the remote_monitoring_user built-in user, and the remote_monitoring_collector and remote_monitoring_agent built-in roles for collecting and sending monitoring information. You can use the built-in user, if it’s available in your environment, or create a user who has the privileges needed to collect and send monitoring information.

    If you use the remote_monitoring_user user, make sure you set the password.

    If you don’t use the remote_monitoring_user user:

    1. Create a user on the production cluster who will collect and send monitoring information.

    2. Assign the following roles to the user:

      Role Why needed?

      remote_monitoring_collector

      Collect monitoring metrics from Heartbeat

      remote_monitoring_agent

      Send monitoring data to the monitoring cluster
    3. Assign the following role to users who will view the monitoring data in Kibana:
    Role Why needed?

    monitoring_user

    Use Stack Monitoring in Kibana to monitor Heartbeat

Grant privileges and roles needed for publishing

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Users who publish events to Elasticsearch need to create and read from Heartbeat indices. To minimize the privileges required by the writer role, you can use the setup role to pre-load dependencies. Then turn off setup options in the Heartbeat config file before running Heartbeat to publish events. For example:

setup.template.enabled: false
setup.ilm.check_exists: false
setup.ilm.overwrite: false

Omit ilm.check_exists and ilm.overwrite if ILM is disabled.

To grant the required privileges:

  1. Create a writer role, called something like heartbeat_writer, that has the following privileges (this list assumes the setup options shown earlier are set to false):

    Privileges Why needed?

    monitor

    Send monitoring info

    read_ilm

    Read the ILM policy when connecting to clusters that support ILM

    view_index_metadata on heartbeat-* indices

    Check for alias when connecting to clusters that support ILM

    index on heartbeat-* indices

    Index events into Elasticsearch

    create_index on heartbeat-* indices

    Create daily indices when connecting to clusters that do not support ILM

    Omit any privileges that aren’t relevant in your environment.

  2. Assign the writer role to users who will index events into Elasticsearch.

Grant privileges and roles needed to read Heartbeat data

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Kibana users typically need to view dashboards and visualizations that contain Heartbeat data. These users might also need to create and edit dashboards and visualizations.

To grant users the required privileges:

  1. Create a reader role, called something like heartbeat_reader, that has the following privilege:

    Privilege Why needed?

    read on heartbeat-* indices

    Read data indexed by Heartbeat

  2. Assign the reader role, along with the following built-in roles, to users who need to read Heartbeat data:

    Roles Why needed?

    kibana_user or kibana_dashboard_only_user

    Use Kibana. kibana_dashboard_only_user grants read-only access to dashboards.

    Omit any roles that aren’t relevant in your environment.

Learn more about users and roles

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Want to learn more about creating users and roles? See Securing the Elastic Stack. Also see:

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