9.3. Extended Example: Read-Only Access for Business Users

JBoss ON distinguishes between read permissions and write permissions. Neither read nor write access is implicit to any object or functional area in JBoss ON, which gives administrators some flexibility in where and what access is granted.

The Setup

Example Co. needs some of its management team to be able to read and access JBoss ON data to track infrastructure performance and maintenance, define incident response procedures, and plan equipment upgrades. While these business users need to view JBoss ON information, they should not be able to edit any of the configuration, which is handled by the IT and development departments.

Tim the IT Guy plans to create a special business managers role that will allow users to "see but not touch" the resource configuration.

The Plan

Tim the IT Guy first defines what actions the business users need to perform, and they need to be able to see everything:

  • View resources in the inventory and histories for adding and deleting resources.
  • View monitoring information, including measurements and events.
  • View alerts.
  • View content and bundles and any deployments to resources.
  • View configuration drift.
  • View all resource histories for configuration and operations.
  • View user details to get information for auditing actions.
All of the global permissions relate to creating entries and managing configuration in JBoss ON and the inventory — which none of the business managers need to be able to do. There is one exception: the view users permission, which allows regular users to see the details of other users. That is necessary, because many actions such as running operations and changing resource configuration list what user initiated the action. Being able to view user information is required for adequate auditing of infrastructure changes.
The default selection for roles is for all resource-level permissions to grant read access to users, with the exception of configuration rights, which have no access. Tim the IT Guy decides to grant read-only access to the configuration so that managers can check the configuration history, which could be useful for policy planning. The group has read-only access to all resources and to items like reports.

The Results

Business users are given access to all of the information they need, without being able to change any configuration or inventory accidentally.

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