What Is Azure Resource Manager Reader Role and How Does It Work

The Azure Resource Manager Reader role is a crucial part of Azure's access control system. It allows users to view resources, but not make any changes to them.

By assigning the Reader role, users can view all resources in a subscription, including their properties and resource groups. This makes it easy for administrators to delegate tasks to others.

The Reader role also allows users to view resource groups, including their properties and resources. This is especially useful for users who need to monitor resources but don't need to make changes.

In Azure, the Reader role is a built-in role that can be assigned to users through the Azure portal or using Azure PowerShell.

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The Azure Resource Manager Reader Role is a crucial aspect of Azure's access management system. It allows users to view existing Azure resources without being able to make any changes.

This role is one of the three basic roles that apply to all resource types in Azure, along with Owner and Contributor. The Reader role is the most restrictive, granting users only the ability to view resources.

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Here are the built-in RBAC roles in Azure, including the Reader role:

Assigning the Reader role at the subscription scope will allow users to view every resource group and every resource in the subscription.

Broaden your view: Azure Subscription vs Resource Group

Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enables fine-grained access management for Azure, allowing you to segregate duties within your DevOps team and grant only the amount of access to users that they need to perform their jobs.

To grant access, you assign the appropriate RBAC role to users, groups, and applications, at the right scope. This can be at the subscription scope, resource group scope, or even specific resources like websites, virtual machines, and subnets.

You can manage access using Azure PowerShell, where you can list RBAC roles, inspect operations, and assign roles to users, groups, and applications. The RBAC role that you assign dictates what resources the user or application can manage within that scope.

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Here are the built-in monitoring roles provided by Azure RBAC:

These roles can be assigned to users, groups, service principals, and managed identities. If the built-in roles don't meet your team's needs, you can create an Azure custom role with granular permissions.

In Azure, each subscription belongs to one and only one directory. This hierarchical structure is essential for managing access and permissions.

Each resource group belongs to one and only one subscription. This means that access granted at the subscription level can be inherited by the resources within that subscription.

Access that you grant at parent scopes is inherited at child scopes. For example, if you grant reader role to an Azure AD group at the subscription scope, the members of that group will be able to view every resource group and every resource in the subscription.

Granting contributor role to an application at the resource group scope allows it to manage resources of all types in that group, but not other groups in the subscription.

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Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a powerful tool for managing access to Azure resources. It enables fine-grained access management by segregating duties within your DevOps team and granting only the amount of access to users that they need to perform their jobs.

To grant access to Azure resources, you need to assign the appropriate RBAC role to users, groups, and applications at the right scope. This can be at the subscription scope, resource group scope, or even specific resource scope.

RBAC roles dictate what resources the user or application can manage within that scope. For example, the Owner role has full access to all resources, while the Reader role can only view existing Azure resources.

You can list available RBAC roles using the `Get-AzureRmRoleDefinition` command in Azure PowerShell. This command also shows the operations to which each role grants access.

Here are the three basic built-in RBAC roles that apply to all resource types:

These roles are a good starting point, but you can also create custom roles with granular permissions to meet the specific needs of your team. For example, you can create a custom role for an Activity Log Reader with specific permissions using PowerShell.

RBAC also provides built-in roles for monitoring, such as Monitoring Reader and Monitoring Contributor, which grant read and write permissions, respectively.

On a similar theme: Azure Create Custom Role

Azure RBAC has three basic roles that apply to all resource types: Owner, Contributor, and Reader. The Owner role has full access to all resources, including the right to delegate access to others.

The Contributor role can create and manage all types of Azure resources, but can't grant access to others. Reader can only view existing Azure resources.

The Virtual Machine Contributor role allows creation and management of virtual machines, but does not allow management of the virtual network or the subnet that the virtual machine connects to. This highlights the importance of specific roles for managing specific resources.

Built-in monitoring roles in Azure include Monitoring Reader and Monitoring Contributor, which provide read and write permissions, respectively. These roles are suitable for users who need to monitor Azure resources.

If the built-in roles don't meet the needs of your team, you can create an Azure custom role with granular permissions. This allows you to tailor permissions to specific needs, such as creating an Activity Log Reader role.

To limit access to monitoring-related storage accounts, you can generate a shared access signature (SAS) on the storage account with service-level read-only access to blob storage. Alternatively, you can grant the entity the Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/listkeys/action permission on that particular storage account.

A different take: Azure Resource Types

The Actions property of a custom role specifies the Azure operations to which the role grants access. It's a collection of operation strings that identify securable operations of Azure resource providers.

You can use wildcards (*) to grant access to all operations that match the operation string. For instance, */read grants access to read operations for all resource types of all Azure resource providers.

Here are some examples of operation strings:

You can use the Get-AzureRmProviderOperation or azure provider operations show commands to list operations of Azure resource providers, verify that an operation string is valid, and expand wildcard operation strings.

Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is a role-based access control service to manage user's access to Azure resources, including what they can do with those resources and what areas they can access.

RBAC is an authorization system based on Azure Resource Manager, which provides fine-grained access management of Azure resources.

Explore further: How to Give Access to Resource Group in Azure

A role assignment is composed of a security principal, role definition, and scope.

Attaching a role definition to a user, group, service principal, and managed identity to grant access to a particular scope is called role assignment.

You can attach multiple role assignments since RBAC is an additive model.

Azure RBAC supports both allow and deny assignments.

Here are the key concepts to keep in mind:

Classic subscription administrator roles have full access to an Azure subscription.