Controlling Access to JMX MBeans

Many monitoring and administrative tools use Management Beans (MBeans) to perform actions on the DataStax Enterprise (DSE) cluster.

When Java Management Extensions (JMX) authentication is enabled, non-superuser roles require access to MBeans on order to use nodetool and other DataStax Enterprise (DSE) utilities. Additionally, access to MBeans may be required by third-party monitoring tools or other custom management utilities that interact with the database using JMX.

Many of the DSE utilities use the same or similar MBeans, therefore it can be difficult to create permission sets that limit the commands a user can run. For example, nodetool status, nodetool decommission, nodetool removenode, nodetool drain, and others, require EXECUTE permissions on the StorageService MBean.

All nodetool commands require DESCRIBE on all MBeans.

Access denied error when permission required

When the role martin tries to execute nodetool status without access to MBeans,

nodetool -u martin -pw password status

the request is denied.

nodetool: Failed to connect to '127.0.0.1:7199' - SecurityException: 'Access Denied'.

Procedure

Create an MBEAN administrator role:
1. Create an MBean administrator role:
  CREATE ROLE mbean_admin;
2. Give the role access to all MBeans:
  GRANT ALL PERMISSIONS on ALL MBEANS to mbean_admin;
3. Assign the role to a user or group role:
  GRANT mbean_admin TO mike;
  To get a complete list of MBeans, see Using nodetool sjk.

Minimal permission is required for a role to run nodetool commands:

Login to cqlsh using a superuser account or a role that has full access to MBeans.
Grant the non-superuser role DESCRIBE on all MBEANS:
```
GRANT DESCRIBE ON ALL MBEANS TO martin;
```

Grant the role both SELECT and EXECUTE permission on the Storage Service MBEAN:

GRANT SELECT, EXECUTE ON MBEAN 'org.apache.cassandra.db:type=StorageService' TO martin;

Grant the role EXECUTE on the Endpoint Snitch Information MBean:

GRANT EXECUTE ON MBEAN 'org.apache.cassandra.db:type=EndpointSnitchInfo' TO martin;

The role martin can execute the nodetool command.

nodetool -u martin -pw password status

Datacenter: Cassandra
=====================
Status=Up/Down
|/ State=Normal/Leaving/Joining/Moving
--  Address         Load       Tokens       Owns    Host ID                               Rack
UN  10.10.100.12  67.45 MiB  1            ?       8234303e-1f0b-4ced-844b-48e1ccbce3e2  rack1
UN  10.10.100.30  776.03 KiB  1            ?       ff96a036-a4e3-4257-8787-a66010919c36  rack2