Permissions and Personas

Permissions are a system-level mechanism that control what actions a user is allowed to take through the Immuta API and UI and reflect their user persona. Permissions can be added to any user by a user admin, but the permissions themselves are managed by Immuta and cannot be added or removed in the Immuta UI.

User personas

• Application admins: Application admins manage the configuration of Immuta for their organization. These users can configure Immuta to use external identity managers and catalogs, enable or disable data handlers, adjust email and cache settings, generate system API keys, and manage various other advanced settings.

• Auditors: Auditors can see and inspect all audit logs associated with Immuta and its integrations. This includes query, authentication, policy, project, and tag events from your Immuta users and data sources.

• Data owners: In order for data to be available in the Immuta platform, a data owner — the individual or team responsible for the data — needs to connect their data to Immuta. Once data is connected to Immuta, that data is called a data source. Once registered as a data source, the data owners have permission to set subscription policies and data policies on those data sources. Data owners can also build global policies just like governors, but they are restricted to only the data sources they own.

• Data users: Data users consume the data available through Immuta in their data platform as usual.

• Domain delegates: These users accountable to manage actions on data sources in a particular domain. This currently includes applying policies and auditing activity.

• Governors: Governors set global policies within Immuta, meaning they can apply policies across all data sources. Governors can manage all tags and purposes and create domains, which are containers of data sources where users can be assigned a domain-specific permission to manage policies on only the data sources in those domains.

• Project managers: These users inspect, manage, approve, and deny various project changes, including purpose requests and project data sources.

• Project owners: These users can create their own project to get approvals for purpose-based access controls (PBAC).

• User admins: These users are able to manage the permissions, attributes, and groups that attach to each user. Permissions are only managed locally within Immuta, but groups and attributes can be managed locally or derived from user management frameworks, such as LDAP or Active Directory, that are external to Immuta.

The table below illustrates the global and domain permissions associated with each user persona.

Permissions

Permission	Scope	Persona	Actions
APPLICATION_ADMIN	Global	Application admin	Gives the user access to administrative actions for the configuration of Immuta. These actions include configuring integrations and connections, adding external IAMs, and connecting external catalogs.
AUDIT	Global	Auditor	Gives the user access to the audit logs
Audit Activity	Domain	Domain delegate	Audit domain-related activity within particular domain(s)
CREATE_DATA_SOURCE	Global		Create data sources
CREATE_DATA_SOURCE_IN_PROJECT	Global		Create derived data sources within a project (This permission has been deprecated.)
CREATE_FILTER	Global	N/A	Create and save a search filter (This permission has been deprecated.)
CREATE_PROJECT	Global	Project owner	Create projects
FETCH_POLICY_INFO	Global	Data owner	Granted access to an endpoint that returns visibilities, masking information, and filters for a given data source
GOVERNANCE	Global	Governor	Create and manage purposes Create and manage tags Create global policies that apply to any data sources (inside or outside domains) Create, manage, and delete domains (domain must be empty to be deleted) Add existing data sources to any domain Remove data sources from any domain without adding it to another domain
IMPERSONATE_USER	Global	Data user	Impersonate other Immuta users
Manage Policies	Domain	Domain delegate	Create policies that apply to the domain(s) they are authorized to
PROJECT_MANAGEMENT	Global	Project manager	Create purposes, approve and deny purpose requests in projects
USER_ADMIN	Global	User admin	Manage user permissions, including domain-specific permissions on all domains

You can also create custom permissions, which should be used for assigning manual subscription policy approvals.

Data source roles

There are several roles that can be assigned to users and groups for a specific data source. See the Data sources in Immuta page for a list of data source roles and descriptions.

Audit

The following permission-related events are audited and can be found on the audit page in the UI:

• PermissionApplied: A global permission is applied to a user.
• PermissionRemoved: A global permission is removed from a user.
• DomainPermissionsUpdated: A domain-specific permission is applied to or removed from a user or group.

User metrics

Purpose

Collecting Immuta usage metrics from tenants helps Immuta gain insight into how organizations are using Immuta (not who they are or what their data looks like) to understand what features are heavily used. These metrics guide improvements to the user experience.

What is collected?

The metrics collected are anonymized data points that provide information on Immuta feature usage but cannot be linked to an individual user or data source. Specifically, Immuta collects what workflows the users are completing and what the users are touching in the UI.

• Workflows users are completing: These workflow metrics (creating policies, data sources, projects, etc.) are aggregates, such as the number of data sources created in a day, not individual events.

• What users are touching: These metrics indicate what users click in Immuta, such as the create a data source button.

Benefits

• Product input: Input from user metrics helps Immuta make product decisions. Providing your metrics is the best way to provide product feedback directly to Immuta.

• Improve user experience: Insights into the activity of different personas (governors, data owners) can be used to improve the Immuta user interface and create meaningful feedback loops.

• Internal insights: Gaining insights into your own Immuta use can reveal habit loops or pain points that users experience that may not be obvious. Metrics will enable those to be identified and improved.

• Prove value: Quantifying the areas of Immuta that you are using the most is the key to understanding the value that Immuta brings to your organization.