Policies Guide

Introduction

DataHub provides the ability to declare fine-grained access control Policies via the UI & GraphQL API. Access policies in DataHub define who can do what to which resources. A few policies in plain English include

• Dataset Owners should be allowed to edit documentation, but not Tags.
• Jenny, our Data Steward, should be allowed to edit Tags for any Dashboard, but no other metadata.
• James, a Data Analyst, should be allowed to edit the Links for a specific Data Pipeline he is a downstream consumer of.
• The Data Platform team should be allowed to manage users & groups, view platform analytics, & manage policies themselves.

In this document, we'll take a deeper look at DataHub Policies & how to use them effectively.

What is a Policy?

There are 2 types of Policy within DataHub:

1. Platform Policies
2. Metadata Policies

We'll briefly describe each.

Platform Policies

Platform policies determine who has platform-level privileges on DataHub. These privileges include

• Managing Users & Groups
• Viewing the DataHub Analytics Page
• Managing Policies themselves

Platform policies can be broken down into 2 parts:

1. Actors: Who the policy applies to (Users or Groups)
2. Privileges: Which privileges should be assigned to the Actors (e.g. "View Analytics")

Note that platform policies do not include a specific "target resource" against which the Policies apply. Instead, they simply serve to assign specific privileges to DataHub users and groups.

Metadata Policies

Metadata policies determine who can do what to which Metadata Entities. For example,

• Who can edit Dataset Documentation & Links?
• Who can add Owners to a Chart?
• Who can add Tags to a Dashboard?

and so on.

A Metadata Policy can be broken down into 3 parts:

1. Actors: The 'who'. Specific users, groups that the policy applies to.
2. Privileges: The 'what'. What actions are being permitted by a policy, e.g. "Add Tags".
3. Resources: The 'which'. Resources that the policy applies to, e.g. "All Datasets".

Actors

We currently support 3 ways to define the set of actors the policy applies to: a) list of users b) list of groups, and c) owners of the entity. You also have the option to apply the policy to all users or groups.

Privileges

Check out the list of privileges here . Note, the privileges are semantic by nature, and does not tie in 1-to-1 with the aspect model.

All edits on the UI are covered by a privilege, to make sure we have the ability to restrict write access.

We currently support the following:

Platform-level privileges for DataHub operators to access & manage the administrative functionality of the system.

Platform Privileges	Description
Manage Policies	Allow actor to create and remove access control policies. Be careful - Actors with this privilege are effectively super users.
Manage Metadata Ingestion	Allow actor to create, remove, and update Metadata Ingestion sources.
Manage Secrets	Allow actor to create & remove secrets stored inside DataHub.
Manage Users & Groups	Allow actor to create, remove, and update users and groups on DataHub.
Manage All Access Tokens	Allow actor to create, remove, and list access tokens for all users on DataHub.
Create Domains	Allow the actor to create new Domains
Manage Domains	Allow actor to create and remove any Domains.
View Analytics	Allow the actor access to the DataHub analytics dashboard.
Generate Personal Access Tokens	Allow the actor to generate access tokens for personal use with DataHub APIs.
Manage User Credentials	Allow the actor to generate invite links for new native DataHub users, and password reset links for existing native users.
Manage Glossaries	Allow the actor to create, edit, move, and delete Glossary Terms and Term Groups
Create Tags	Allow the actor to create new Tags
Manage Tags	Allow the actor to create and remove any Tags
Manage Public Views	Allow the actor to create, edit, and remove any public (shared) Views.
Restore Indices API1	Allow the actor to restore indices for a set of entities via API
Enable/Disable Writeability API1	Allow the actor to enable or disable GMS writeability for use in data migrations
Apply Retention API1	Allow the actor to apply aspect retention via API

Common metadata privileges to view & modify any entity within DataHub.

Common Privileges	Description
View Entity Page	Allow actor to access the entity page for the resource in the UI. If not granted, it will redirect them to an unauthorized page.
Edit Tags	Allow actor to add and remove tags to an asset.
Edit Glossary Terms	Allow actor to add and remove glossary terms to an asset.
Edit Owners	Allow actor to add and remove owners of an entity.
Edit Description	Allow actor to edit the description (documentation) of an entity.
Edit Links	Allow actor to edit links associated with an entity.
Edit Status	Allow actor to edit the status of an entity (soft deleted or not).
Edit Domain	Allow actor to edit the Domain of an entity.
Edit Deprecation	Allow actor to edit the Deprecation status of an entity.
Edit Assertions	Allow actor to add and remove assertions from an entity.
Edit Incidents	Allow actor to raise and resolve incidents for an entity.
Edit All	Allow actor to edit any information about an entity. Super user privileges. Controls the ability to ingest using API when REST API Authorization is enabled.
Get Timeline API1	Allow actor to get the timeline of an entity via API.
Get Entity API1	Allow actor to get an entity via API.
Get Timeseries Aspect API1	Allow actor to get a timeseries aspect via API.
Get Aspect/Entity Count APIs1	Allow actor to get aspect and entity counts via API.
Search API1	Allow actor to search for entities via API.
Produce Platform Event API1	Allow actor to ingest a platform event via API.
Explain ElasticSearch Query API1	Allow actor to explain an ElasticSearch query.

Specific entity-level privileges that are not generalizable.

Entity	Privilege	Description
Dataset	Edit Dataset Column Tags	Allow actor to edit the column (field) tags associated with a dataset schema.
Dataset	Edit Dataset Column Glossary Terms	Allow actor to edit the column (field) glossary terms associated with a dataset schema.
Dataset	Edit Dataset Column Descriptions	Allow actor to edit the column (field) descriptions associated with a dataset schema.
Dataset	View Dataset Usage	Allow actor to access usage metadata about a dataset both in the UI and in the GraphQL API. This includes example queries, number of queries, etc. Also applies to REST APIs when REST API Authorization is enabled.
Dataset	View Dataset Profile	Allow actor to access a dataset's profile both in the UI and in the GraphQL API. This includes snapshot statistics like #rows, #columns, null percentage per field, etc.
Tag	Edit Tag Color	Allow actor to change the color of a Tag.
Group	Edit Group Members	Allow actor to add and remove members to a group.
User	Edit User Profile	Allow actor to change the user's profile including display name, bio, title, profile image, etc.
User + Group	Edit Contact Information	Allow actor to change the contact information such as email & chat handles.
GlossaryNode	Manage Direct Glossary Children	Allow the actor to create, edit, and delete the direct children of the selected entities.
GlossaryNode	Manage All Glossary Children	Allow the actor to create, edit, and delete everything underneath the selected entities.

Resources

Resource filter defines the set of resources that the policy applies to is defined using a list of criteria. Each criterion defines a field type (like type, urn, domain), a list of field values to compare, and a condition (like EQUALS). It essentially checks whether the field of a certain resource matches any of the input values. Note, that if there are no criteria or resource is not set, policy is applied to ALL resources.

For example, the following resource filter will apply the policy to datasets, charts, and dashboards under domain 1.

{
    "resources": {
      "filter": {
        "criteria": [
          {
            "field": "TYPE",
            "condition": "EQUALS",
            "values": [
              "dataset",
              "chart",
              "dashboard"
            ]
          },
          {
            "field": "DOMAIN",
            "values": [
              "urn:li:domain:domain1"
            ],
            "condition": "EQUALS"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
}

Where resources is inside the info aspect of a Policy.

Supported fields are as follows

Field Type	Description	Example
type	Type of the resource	dataset, chart, dataJob
urn	Urn of the resource	urn:li:dataset:...
domain	Domain of the resource	urn:li:domain:domainX

Managing Policies

Policies can be managed on the page Settings > Permissions > Policies page. The Policies tab will only be visible to those users having the Manage Policies privilege.

Out of the box, DataHub is deployed with a set of pre-baked Policies. The set of default policies are created at deploy time and can be found inside the policies.json file within metadata-service/war/src/main/resources/boot. This set of policies serves the following purposes:

1. Assigns immutable super-user privileges for the root datahub user account (Immutable)
2. Assigns all Platform privileges for all Users by default (Editable)

The reason for #1 is to prevent people from accidentally deleting all policies and getting locked out (datahub super user account can be a backup) The reason for #2 is to permit administrators to log in via OIDC or another means outside of the datahub root account when they are bootstrapping with DataHub. This way, those setting up DataHub can start managing policies without friction. Note that these privilege can and likely should be altered inside the Policies page of the UI.

Pro-Tip: To login using the datahub account, simply navigate to <your-datahub-domain>/login and enter datahub, datahub. Note that the password can be customized for your deployment by changing the user.props file within the datahub-frontend module. Notice that JaaS authentication must be enabled.

Configuration

By default, the Policies feature is enabled. This means that the deployment will support creating, editing, removing, and most importantly enforcing fine-grained access policies.

In some cases, these capabilities are not desirable. For example, if your company's users are already used to having free reign, you may want to keep it that way. Or perhaps it is only your Data Platform team who actively uses DataHub, in which case Policies may be overkill.

For these scenarios, we've provided a back door to disable Policies in your deployment of DataHub. This will completely hide the policies management UI and by default will allow all actions on the platform. It will be as though each user has all privileges, both of the Platform & Metadata flavor.

To disable Policies, you can simply set the AUTH_POLICIES_ENABLED environment variable for the datahub-gms service container to false. For example in your docker/datahub-gms/docker.env, you'd place

AUTH_POLICIES_ENABLED=false

REST API Authorization

Policies only affect REST APIs when the environment variable REST_API_AUTHORIZATION is set to true for GMS. Some policies only apply when this setting is enabled, marked above, and other Metadata and Platform policies apply to the APIs where relevant, also specified in the table above.

Coming Soon

The DataHub team is hard at work trying to improve the Policies feature. We are planning on building out the following:

• Hide edit action buttons on Entity pages to reflect user privileges

Under consideration

• Ability to define Metadata Policies against multiple reosurces scoped to particular "Containers" (e.g. A "schema", "database", or "collection")

Feedback / Questions / Concerns

We want to hear from you! For any inquiries, including Feedback, Questions, or Concerns, reach out on Slack!

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1. Only active if REST_API_AUTHORIZATION_ENABLED is true↩