Roles and permissions in Microsoft Sentinel (2024)

This article explains how Microsoft Sentinel assigns permissions to user roles and identifies the allowed actions for each role. Microsoft Sentinel usesAzure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) to providebuilt-in rolesthat can be assigned to users, groups, and services in Azure.

Use Azure RBAC to create and assign roles within your security operations team to grant appropriate access to Microsoft Sentinel. The different roles give you fine-grained control over what Microsoft Sentinel users can see and do. Azure roles can be assigned in the Microsoft Sentinel workspace directly (see note below), or in a subscription or resource group that the workspace belongs to, which Microsoft Sentinel inherits.

Roles and permissions for working in Microsoft Sentinel

Microsoft Sentinel-specific roles

All Microsoft Sentinel built-in roles grant read access to the data in your Microsoft Sentinel workspace.

• Microsoft Sentinel Reader can view data, incidents, workbooks, and other Microsoft Sentinel resources.

• Microsoft Sentinel Responder can, in addition to the above, manage incidents (assign, dismiss, etc.).

• Microsoft Sentinel Contributor can, in addition to the above, create and edit workbooks, analytics rules, and other Microsoft Sentinel resources.

• Microsoft Sentinel Playbook Operator can list, view, and manually run playbooks.

• Microsoft Sentinel Automation Contributor allows Microsoft Sentinel to add playbooks to automation rules. It isn't meant for user accounts.

Other roles and permissions

Users with particular job requirements may need to be assigned other roles or specific permissions in order to accomplish their tasks.

• Working with playbooks to automate responses to threats

  Microsoft Sentinel uses playbooks for automated threat response. Playbooks are built on Azure Logic Apps, and are a separate Azure resource. For specific members of your security operations team, you might want to assign the ability to use Logic Apps for Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) operations. You can use the Microsoft Sentinel Playbook Operator role to assign explicit, limited permission for running playbooks, and the Logic App Contributor role to create and edit playbooks.

• Giving Microsoft Sentinel permissions to run playbooks

  Microsoft Sentinel uses a special service account to run incident-trigger playbooks manually or to call them from automation rules. The use of this account (as opposed to your user account) increases the security level of the service.

  For an automation rule to run a playbook, this account must be granted explicit permissions to the resource group where the playbook resides. At that point, any automation rule can run any playbook in that resource group. To grant these permissions to this service account, your account must have Owner permissions to the resource groups containing the playbooks.

• Connecting data sources to Microsoft Sentinel

  For a user to add data connectors, you must assign the user write permissions on the Microsoft Sentinel workspace. Note the required extra permissions for each connector, as listed on the relevant connector page.

• Guest users assigning incidents

  If a guest user needs to be able to assign incidents, you need to assign the Directory Reader to the user, in addition to the Microsoft Sentinel Responder role. Note that the Directory Reader role is not an Azure role but an Azure Active Directory role, and that regular (non-guest) users have this role assigned by default.

• Creating and deleting workbooks

  To create and delete a Microsoft Sentinel workbook, the user needs either the Microsoft Sentinel Contributor role or a lesser Microsoft Sentinel role, together with the Workbook Contributor Azure Monitor role. This role isn't necessary for using workbooks, only for creating and deleting.

Azure and Log Analytics roles you might see assigned

When you assign Microsoft Sentinel-specific Azure roles, you may come across other Azure and Log Analytics roles that may have been assigned to users for other purposes. Note that these roles grant a wider set of permissions that include access to your Microsoft Sentinel workspace and other resources:

• Azure roles: Owner, Contributor, and Reader. Azure roles grant access across all your Azure resources, including Log Analytics workspaces and Microsoft Sentinel resources.

• Log Analytics roles: Log Analytics Contributor and Log Analytics Reader. Log Analytics roles grant access to your Log Analytics workspaces.

For example, a user assigned the Microsoft Sentinel Reader role, but not the Microsoft Sentinel Contributor role, can still edit items in Microsoft Sentinel, if that user is also assigned the Azure-level Contributor role. Therefore, if you want to grant permissions to a user only in Microsoft Sentinel, carefully remove this user’s prior permissions, making sure you do not break any needed access to another resource.

Microsoft Sentinel roles, permissions, and allowed actions

This table summarizes the Microsoft Sentinel roles and their allowed actions in Microsoft Sentinel.

* Users with these roles can create and delete workbooks with the Workbook Contributor role. Learn about Other roles and permissions.

Review the role recommendations for which roles to assign to which users in your SOC.

Custom roles and advanced Azure RBAC

• Custom roles. In addition to, or instead of, using Azure built-in roles, you can create Azure custom roles for Microsoft Sentinel. You create Azure custom roles for Microsoft Sentinel in the same way as Azure custom roles, based on specific permissions to Microsoft Sentinel and to Azure Log Analytics resources.

• Log Analytics RBAC. You can use the Log Analytics advanced Azure RBAC across the data in your Microsoft Sentinel workspace. This includes both data type-based Azure RBAC and resource-context Azure RBAC. To learn more:

  • Manage log data and workspaces in Azure Monitor
  • Resource-context RBAC for Microsoft Sentinel
  • Table-level RBAC

  Resource-context and table-level RBAC are two ways to give access to specific data in your Microsoft Sentinel workspace, without allowing access to the entire Microsoft Sentinel experience.

Role and permissions recommendations

After understanding how roles and permissions work in Microsoft Sentinel, you can review these best practices for applying roles to your users:

Next steps

In this article, you learned how to work with roles for Microsoft Sentinel users and what each role enables users to do.

Find blog posts about Azure security and compliance at the Microsoft Sentinel Blog.