User accounts
A user account represents a user's identity in Chronosphere Observability Platform. Accounts can belong to teams.
Administrative users
A user account that's a member of a team with the SysAdmin role has administrative
access to Observability Platform features, including the abilities to create teams
and user accounts, assign users to teams, and define team permissions.
Authenticating as a user
To authenticate with Observability Platform, a user typically signs in interactively with their user account.
A user account can also use a temporary personal access token for non-interactive authentication, such as with tools like Chronoctl or for clients that interact with the Chronosphere API.
Observability Platform attributes all actions that a user takes to their user account.
User accounts are distinct from service accounts, which provide identities for services and allow administrators to define what each service can access. Service accounts authenticate non-interactively using a unique API token permanently associated with each account.
For details, refer to Service accounts.
View accounts
You can view accounts in the navigation menu, or by using Chronoctl.
In the navigation menu, click Go to Admin and then select Platform > Users.
For details, see Accounts and teams.
Add a user account
To add user accounts, you must use an account that belongs to a team with the
SysAdmin role.
This process applies only to accounts without single sign-on enabled. For details, see Authenticating with Chronosphere.
To add a user account, you must have administrative privileges:
- In the navigation menu, click Go to Admin and then select Platform > Users.
- Click Add user.
- Enter the user's email address into the field.
- Click Invite User.
- Optional: Add the user to a team. Users without an assigned team receive viewer permissions.
Observability Platform sends an invitation email to the address containing a link to verify and access the user account.
After the user accepts the invitation, they must verify their account, at which point the user's email address appears in the list of accounts with a green checkmark.
Delete a user account
To remove a user account from Observability Platform:
- If your environment uses a single sign-on (SSO) provider, remove the user account from the identity provider (IdP) permission group to prevent the user from signing in to Observability Platform.
- To remove the user account from display in Observability Platform itself, create a ticket with Chronosphere Support and request to have the user account deleted.
Users of Okta with SCIM
If you're using Okta and have SCIM integrated with the Observability Platform connection, removing the user from access in the IdP deprovisions and removes the user from Observability Platform.
Service accounts
Ensure a service account isn't being used before you delete it. Service account tokens are used by critical components of Observability Platform (including the Chronosphere Collector), and incorrectly deleting a service account can significantly impact your environment.
Deleted user accounts with access to a service account token can continue to access Observability Platform when using tools like Chronoctl and Terraform. To avoid access by these accounts, delete any service accounts created by deleted user accounts. To find these accounts, in the navigation menu, click Go to Admin and then select Platform > Service Accounts and review the Created By column.