Exploring New ZendHQ Role-Based Authentication Features

Companies have a variety of software access restriction requirements, and these often extend to tools like ZendHQ. In this blog, we'll dive in on the new role-based authentication features in ZendHQ, show how to administer permissions, and discuss what those changes mean for ZendHQ users.

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What Are Role-Based Authentication Features?

Role-based authentication features refer to a set of permissions that limit who has access to certain aspects within a PHP application. Also known as role-based access control, these features minimize the opportunities for error compared to assigning individual permissions to specific users.

Why Role-Based Authentication In ZendHQ Matters

Since we introduced ZendHQ almost two years ago, the GUI has operated under a single-role paradigm, with a single set of credentials, offering full administrative access to ZendHQ. Several of our customers have communicated a need for more robust and granular access controls to suit their organizational needs. As examples:

• They may want to limit who is able to define and modify monitoring rules, to ensure that they are setup in a way that will not inundate their IT operations staff with notifications, or to ensure that actionable notifications are provided.
• Some organizations want to control who is able to create and delete queues, or who can suspend or re-activate queues, or who can create jobs via the admin.
• Some organizations may not need their IT operations staff to be able to initiate Z-Ray sessions.
• The ability to delete or archive historical data captured by ZendHQ may need to be restricted to administrators, and not accessible by developers.

Earlier this week, we released version 1.6.0 of ZendHQ, which provides identity and access management for ZendHQ. This feature provides the ability to define your own groups, assign permissions to each service ZendHQ exposes, and to assign users to groups. Let's take a look at these new role-based authentication features. 

ZendHQ Role-Based Authentication Overview

At the highest level, you can can create groups, assign groups permissions to ZendHQ services, and then define users and assign them to groups using our new role-based authentication. When logging into ZendHQ, users will use the credentials provided to them by their ZendHQ administrator, and features of ZendHQ will either be omitted from the GUI, or disabled, if they are not accessible to them.

The general workflow for an administrator will be:

• Create groups.
• Assign permissions to groups.
• Create users.
• Assign users to groups.

Users can be assigned to multiple groups. If they are, they will have access to features based on the greatest access allowed to any group to which they are assigned. For instance, if a user is assigned to a group that provides read-only access to all features, and also to another group that provides write access to Z-Ray, the user will be able to initiate Z-Ray sessions (as that permission is provided with write access to Z-Ray).

Administering Identity and Access Management in ZendHQ

ZendHQ now ships with a new command-line tool, zendhqctl. This tool provides an "access" module that allows listing services and permission information related to them, managing groups, and managing users.

The services exposed by ZendHQ are as folllows.

Permissions are created using a bitmask. While these can be expressed as integers, you can also reference them using notation you're already familiar with: unix file permissions. For example, if you wanted to provide read-only access to monitoring, you'd use +r mon. If you wanted to provide the ability to initialize Z-Ray sessions and view history, you'd use +rw zray. To provide full access to JobQueue, you'd use +rwx jq.

A common request is to be able to define a read-only role. Let's create that, and assign it to a couple of users, Bob and Alice.

zendhqctl access group add readonly --permissions +r conf,mon,ct,zray,jq -c "Read-only group"

Breaking this down, we're creating the group "readonly". When we do, we're setting initial permissions to include "read" permissions to each of the services exposed. We are also providing a comment to associate with the group; this will be printed any time we print information for the group.

Now, let's define some users and assign them to this group:

zendhqctl access user add bob 
zendhqctl access user password bob #prompts to set the password 
zendhqctl access user add alice 
zendhqctl access user password alice # prompts to set the password 
zendhqctl access group add-user readonly alice,bob 

First we create each user, and assign them a password. Then we add both users to the "read-only" group.

There are a lot of different commands exposed by zendhqctl, and each contains copious documentation. Additionally, there are often multiple ways to accomplish something. For instance, in the above example, we could have instead called zendhqctl access user add-group alice readonly to add Alice to the read-only group. Read the zendhqctl access reference for full-details. 

How Role-Based Authentication Impacts Using ZendHQ

So, we know some basics of administering identity and access management in ZendHQ, but what does that mean when using the GUI administration tool?

First, for users who are upgrading to the new version, there's only one change that you'll notice at first. When you login, instead of having just the Hostname/IP and Token inputs:

You will now see a "User name" input, and "Token" becomes "User token" as well:

But ZendHQ didn't have usernames previously! How do you login? For those upgrading, you can login without the username, using the configured ZendHQ token as you did previously. (Alternatively, you can specify the username "admin"!) ZendHQ is configured such that an "admin" role is already configured mimicing the permissions previously used, and using the admin token as configured by default with the service.

Once you have created users, you can now login as one of those users! To best see how this plays out in practice, view the following video.

Final Thoughts

Different organizations have different access management needs for their developer and production tooling. The new role-based authentication support provided with ZendHQ allows organizations to define their own roles and the associated permissions. One side-benefit not mentioned previously is that users do not need to share credentials any longer, which also allows organizations to revoke access without having to change access for all users of the tool.

This is the first of a series of security features planned for ZendHQ. Future releases will build on the identity and access management provided with this release, enabling integration with business user directories.

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Additional Resources

• Documentation - ZendHQ Role Management
• Documentation - zendhqctl Access Command
• Documentation - Initializing ZendHQ Access in Docker Containers
• Product Demo - ZendHQ Demo
• Blog - Exploring ZendHQ Database Query Introspection
• Blog - How to Improve PHP Performance
• Blog - Why Good PHP Monitoring Matters
• Blog - Introducing JobQueue for ZendPHP
• Blog - Finding and Fixing PHP Errors in Production
• Blog - How to Migrate Zend Server to ZendPHP