Roles and permissions in Microsoft Sentinel
This article explains how Microsoft Sentinel assigns permissions to user roles and identifies the allowed actions for each role. Microsoft Sentinel uses Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) to provide built-in roles that can be assigned to users, groups, and services in Azure. This article is part of the Deployment guide for Microsoft Sentinel.
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, or in a subscription or resource group that the workspace belongs to, which Microsoft Sentinel inherits.
Important
Microsoft Sentinel is now generally available within the Microsoft unified security operations platform in the Microsoft Defender portal. For more information, see Microsoft Sentinel in the Microsoft Defender portal.
Roles and permissions for working in Microsoft Sentinel
Grant the appropriate access to the data in your workspace by using built-in roles. You might need to grant more roles or specific permissions depending on a user's job tasks.
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 permissions for Microsoft Sentinel Reader, manage incidents like assign, dismiss, and change incidents.
Microsoft Sentinel Contributor can, in addition to the permissions for Microsoft Sentinel Responder, install and update solutions from content hub, and create and edit Microsoft Sentinel resources like workbooks, analytics rules, and more.
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.
For best results, assign these roles to the resource group that contains the Microsoft Sentinel workspace. This way, the roles apply to all the resources that support Microsoft Sentinel, as those resources should also be placed in the same resource group.
As another option, assign the roles directly to the Microsoft Sentinel workspace itself. If you do that, you must assign the same roles to the SecurityInsights solution resource in that workspace. You might also need to assign them to other resources, and continually manage role assignments to the resources.
Other roles and permissions
Users with particular job requirements might need to be assigned other roles or specific permissions in order to accomplish their tasks.
Install and manage out-of-the-box content
Find packaged solutions for end-to-end products or standalone content from the content hub in Microsoft Sentinel. To install and manage content from the content hub, assign the Microsoft Sentinel Contributor role at the resource group level.
Automate responses to threats with playbooks
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.
Give 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.
Connect data sources to Microsoft Sentinel
For a user to add data connectors, you must assign the user Write permissions on the Microsoft Sentinel workspace. Notice the required extra permissions for each connector, as listed on the relevant connector page.
Allow guest users to assign incidents
If a guest user needs to be able to assign incidents, you need to assign the Directory Reader role to the user, in addition to the Microsoft Sentinel Responder role. The Directory Reader role isn't an Azure role but a Microsoft Entra role, and regular (nonguest) users have this role assigned by default.
Create and delete 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 might come across other Azure and Log Analytics roles that might be assigned to users for other purposes. 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 don't 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.
| Role | View and run playbooks | Create and edit playbooks | Create and edit analytics rules, workbooks, and other Microsoft Sentinel resources | Manage incidents (dismiss, assign, etc.) | View data, incidents, workbooks, and other Microsoft Sentinel resources | Install and manage content from the content hub |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Sentinel Reader | -- | -- | --* | -- | ✓ | -- |
| Microsoft Sentinel Responder | -- | -- | --* | ✓ | ✓ | -- |
| Microsoft Sentinel Contributor | -- | -- | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Microsoft Sentinel Playbook Operator | ✓ | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- |
| Logic App Contributor | ✓ | ✓ | -- | -- | -- | -- |
* 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:
| User type | Role | Resource group | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Security analysts | Microsoft Sentinel Responder | Microsoft Sentinel's resource group | View data, incidents, workbooks, and other Microsoft Sentinel resources. Manage incidents, such as assigning or dismissing incidents. |
| Microsoft Sentinel Playbook Operator | Microsoft Sentinel's resource group, or the resource group where your playbooks are stored | Attach playbooks to analytics and automation rules. Run playbooks. |
|
| Security engineers | Microsoft Sentinel Contributor | Microsoft Sentinel's resource group | View data, incidents, workbooks, and other Microsoft Sentinel resources. Manage incidents, such as assigning or dismissing incidents. Create and edit workbooks, analytics rules, and other Microsoft Sentinel resources. Install and update solutions from content hub. |
| Logic Apps Contributor | Microsoft Sentinel's resource group, or the resource group where your playbooks are stored | Attach playbooks to analytics and automation rules. Run and modify playbooks. |
|
| Service Principal | Microsoft Sentinel Contributor | Microsoft Sentinel's resource group | Automated configuration for management tasks |
More roles might be required depending on the data you ingest or monitor. For example, Microsoft Entra roles might be required, such as the Security Administrator role, to set up data connectors for services in other Microsoft portals.
Resource-based access control
You might have some users who need to access only specific data in your Microsoft Sentinel workspace, but shouldn't have access to the entire Microsoft Sentinel environment. For example, you might want to provide a team outside of security operations with access to the Windows event data for the servers they own.
In such cases, we recommend that you configure your role-based access control (RBAC) based on the resources that are allowed to your users, instead of providing them with access to the Microsoft Sentinel workspace or specific Microsoft Sentinel features. This method is also known as setting up resource-context RBAC. For more information, see Manage access to Microsoft Sentinel data by resource.
Next steps
In this article, you learned how to work with roles for Microsoft Sentinel users and what each role enables users to do.