grafana/docs/sources/permissions/_index.md

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title = "Permissions"
description = "Permissions"
keywords = ["grafana", "configuration", "documentation", "admin", "users", "datasources", "permissions"]
type = "docs"
[menu.docs]
name = "Permissions"
identifier = "permissions"
parent = "admin"
weight = 3
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# Permissions overview

Grafana users have permissions that are determined by their:

- **Organization Role** (Admin, Editor, Viewer)
- Via **Team** memberships where the **Team** has been assigned specific permissions.
- Via permissions assigned directly to user (on folders, dashboards, data sources)
- The Grafana Admin (i.e. Super Admin) user flag.

## Users

Grafana supports a wide variety of internal and external ways for users to authenticate themselves. These include from its own integrated database, from an external SQL server, or from an external LDAP server.

## Grafana Admin

This admin flag makes user a `Super Admin`. This means they can access the `Server Admin` views where all users and organizations can be administrated.

## Organization Roles

Users can belong to one or more organizations. A user's organization membership is tied to a role that defines what the user is allowed to do
in that organization. Grafana supports multiple *organizations* in order to support a wide variety of deployment models, including using a single Grafana instance to provide service to multiple potentially untrusted organizations.

In most cases, Grafana is deployed with a single organization.

Each organization can have one or more data sources.

All dashboards are owned by a particular organization.

 > **Note:** Most metric databases do not provide per-user series authentication. This means that organization data sources and dashboards are available to all users in a particular organization.

Refer to [Organization roles]({{< relref "../permissions/organization_roles.md" >}}) for more information.


## Dashboard and Folder Permissions

Dashboard and folder permissions allow you to remove the default role based permissions for Editors and Viewers and assign permissions to specific **Users** and **Teams**. Learn more about [Dashboard and Folder Permissions]({{< relref "dashboard_folder_permissions.md" >}}).

## Data source permissions

Per default, a data source in an organization can be queried by any user in that organization. For example a user with `Viewer` role can still
issue any possible query to a data source, not just those queries that exist on dashboards he/she has access to.

Data source permissions allows you to change the default permissions for data sources and restrict query permissions to specific **Users** and **Teams**. Read more about [data source permissions]({{< relref "datasource_permissions.md" >}}).