Access control

In Orchestrator, you use roles to control the level of access for users, groups, robot accounts, and external apps. On this page, we go over the notions you need to understand to effectively plan and implement your access control strategy:

• accounts and apps (i.e. user accounts, robot accounts, external apps) which represent the identity used to access Orchestrator resources
• roles, which are assigned to accounts in order to grant them explicit permissions within the UiPath ecosystem
• groups, which are used to simplify account administration by granting the same access to multiple user accounts

Accounts are not created and managed in Orchestrator, only their Orchestrator roles and assignments are. Accounts are created by organization administrators and, once created, they can be assigned to a folder or tenant in Orchestrator.

About permissions

Orchestrator uses an access-control mechanism based on roles and permissions. Roles are collections of permissions meaning that the permissions needed to use certain Orchestrator entities are assigned to roles.

Role-permissions and user-roles relationships allow for a certain level of access to Orchestrator. A user gets the permissions required to perform particular operations through one or multiple roles. Since users are not assigned permissions directly, but only acquire them through roles, permission management involves assigning appropriate roles to the user.

Permission and role types

There are two types of permissions, as follows:

• Tenant permissions define a user's access to resources at the tenant level.
• Folder permissions define the user's access and ability within each folder to which they are assigned.

Two primary permission sets govern operations within folders:

• Folder permissions (tenant scoped):
  • allow a user to create, edit, or delete all folders within the entire tenant.
  • are typically granted to admins, or users responsible for managing the organization.
• Subfolder permissions (folder scoped):
  • allow a user to create, edit, or delete a particular folder they are assigned to, along with any subfolders under it.
  • offer more granular control, enabling users to manage specific folders without having control over the other folders in the tenant.

Based on the permissions they include, there are three types of roles:

• Tenant roles, which include tenant permissions, and are required for working at the tenant level.
• Folder roles, which include permissions to work within a folder.
• Mixed roles, which include both types of permissions.

  With mixed roles, for a global operation, only the user's tenant permissions are taken into consideration. For a folder-specific operation, if a custom role is defined, folder permissions are applied in favor of any tenant permissions present.

  Note: Mixed roles are no longer supported, and you cannot create new ones. If you have mixed roles, we recommend replacing them with a combination of tenant and folder roles to grant the required permissions.

The following resources are available to users, depending on the type of roles they have:

Tenant resources	Folder resources
Alerts Audit Background tasks Libraries License Machines ML Logs ML Packages ML Skills Packages Robots Roles Settings Folders Users Webhooks	Assets Business Rules Storage Files Storage Buckets Connections Environments Execution Media Folder Packages Jobs Logs Monitoring Processes Queues Resource overwrites Triggers Subfolders Action Assignment Action Catalogs Actions Test Case Execution Artifacts Test Data Queue Items Test Data Queues Test Set Executions Test Sets Test Set Schedules Transactions

Permissions without effect

Typically, you can select all available permissions (View, Edit, Create, or Delete) for any permission, except for the following, which have no effect for the listed permissions, and, therefore, you cannot edit them:

Permission type	Permissions	Unavailable permissions
Tenant	Alerts	Delete
	Audit	Edit Create Delete
Folder	Execution Media	Edit
	Logs	Edit Delete
	Monitoring	Create Delete

This is because, for example, it is not possible to edit system-generated logs.

Deciding which permissions to include

Each role is a combination of permissions which control the program areas and actions that accounts with the role can access.

Example: A role called Infra, which is intended for the person managing the VMs you use for automation, may include permissions such as Machines - View, Machines - Edit, Machines - Create, and Machines - Delete, as well as other permissions that are relevant for their job.

When creating or editing a role, you must review the list of available permissions and decide which ones to include or not. Here are some approaches that you can try:

• Start from our default roles: Orchestrator comes with default roles for the most common automation user types, such as the Administrator role, Automation User, and more. You can either use these roles, or duplicate the one that is closest to what you need, and then customize it.
• Create a custom role: When creating a role, you are presented with a list of all available permissions for the tenant or folder level, depending on the role type, and you must decide which ones to include or not.

Viewing permission information

While creating or editing a role, you can hover over the checkbox of a permission to see to which Orchestrator pages the permission allows access. The information can help you broadly decide if to include the permission or not.

Important:

• The functions of permissions can be more complex than only access to and abilities within the context of a page. When in doubt about what permissions are necessary for a task, check the documentation for that task for detailed permission requirements.For advanced users, you can also check the Orchestrator API Swagger, which includes information about the required permissions for each operation. For instructions see Accessing the Swagger file.
• The information that is displayed for each permission only covers Orchestrator pages. It does not cover pages or actions in other UiPath services.