1. Atlan
  2. 🧰 Administration
  3. Access Control

How to create a persona

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🤓 Who can do this? You will need to be an admin user to create personas.

Create persona

To create a persona:

  1. From the left menu of any screen, click Governance.
  2. Under Access Control, click Personas.
  3. If this is the first persona, click the Get started button. Otherwise click the New Persona button.
  4. Enter a meaningful name for the persona, (optional) a description, and then click Create.

You now have an empty persona. It won't do much until you complete the next steps, too!

Add users and groups

To add users and groups to the persona, from within the persona:

  1. To the right of the Users and groups box, click the Add button.
  2. Select users and / or groups:
    1. Under the single-user icon, select users to add to the persona.
    2. Under the double-user icon, select groups to add to the persona.
  3. Click the Update button to save the users and groups to the persona.

Now this persona will be available to those users and groups. It still won't do much, though, without some policies...

(Optional) Add rich documentation

To add rich documentation describing the persona:

  • Under Summary, then Channels, add any Slack channels relevant to the persona.
  • Under Resources, add links to external resources like PDFs, repositories, Notion, Confluence, Google Drive — anything that has a URL.
  • Under Readme, write a richly-formatted description of the persona.

Add policies

For the persona to really do anything, you need to define one or more policies. Repeat the following steps for each set of assets and permissions you want to control through the persona.

💪 Did you know? The higher level at which you can define the assets, the better. For example, if you create a policy at a database level, all future schemas and tables (in that database) will also be covered by the policy.

To add policies to the persona, from within the persona:

  1. Change to the Policies tab.
  2. Click the New Policy button and choose the type of policy.

Add a metadata policy

To grant or restrict permissions to change metadata:

  1. Choose Metadata Policy.
  2. Under Name, briefly describe the policy's intention.
  3. Under Select a connection, choose the connection on which to apply the policy.
  4. (Optional) For Asset selector choose the assets the policy should control. By default, all assets in the connection are included. To select others:
    1. In the All assets box, click the x.
    2. Under Assets selector, click the Add link.
    3. Search for and select the assets to control with the policy, and then click Save.
  5. (Optional) For Configure permissions choose the permissions the policy will grant. By default, all permissions will be granted. To select others:
    1. To the right of Configure permissions click the Edit link.
    2. Select the permissions required. If you are unsure what they do, hover over the checkbox to see a more detailed description of each one.
    3. At the bottom of the list, click Save.
  6. (Optional) For Deny selected permissions choose whether you want to explicitly deny these permissions.
    🚨 Careful! If enabled, this will override all grants of those permissions from any other policies for the same users.
  7. At the bottom of the Metadata Policy sidebar, click Save.

Add a data policy

To grant or restrict permissions to query or preview data:

  1. Choose Data Policy.
  2. Under Name, briefly describe the policy's intention.
  3. Under Select a connection, choose the connection on which to apply the policy.
  4. (Optional) For Asset selector to allow Query choose the assets the policy should control. By default, all assets in the connection are included. To select others:
    1. In the All assets box, click the x.
    2. Under Asset selector to allow Query, click the Add link.
    3. Search for and select the assets to control with the policy, and then click Save.
  5. (Optional) For Deny Query choose whether you want to explicitly deny the ability to query and preview data on these assets.
    🚨 Careful! If enabled, this will override all grants of those permissions from any other policies for the same users.
  6. At the bottom of the Data Policy sidebar, click Save.

Add a glossary policy

To grant or restrict permissions to change glossary contents:

  1. Choose Glossary Policy.
  2. Under Name, briefly describe the policy's intention.
  3. Under Select glossary, choose the glossary or glossaries on which to apply the policy.
  4. (Optional) For Configure permissions choose the permissions the policy will grant. By default, all permissions will be granted. To select others:
    1. To the right of Configure permissions click the Edit link.
    2. Select the permissions required. If you are unsure what they do, hover over the checkbox to see a more detailed description of each one.
    3. At the bottom of the list, click Save.
  5. At the bottom of the Glossary Policy sidebar, click Save.

(Optional) Personalize sidebar

💪 Did you know? You can also personalize the details users will see in the sidebar when in a persona. This is great to limit information overload, by showing only what is relevant to a given set of users.

To personalize the sidebar for the persona:

  1. Change to the Preferences tab of the persona.
  2. To limit the custom metadata that should be visible to the persona:
    1. Expand the Custom Metadata section.
    2. Use the toggles to the right of each custom metadata structure to include it (on) or exclude it (off) for the persona.
  3. To limit the out-of-the-box tabs that should be visible to the persona:
    1. Expand the Asset Sidebar section.
    2. Use the toggles to the right of each tab's name to include it (on) or exclude it (off) for the persona.

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