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Documentation Grafana Mimir Operator and user guide Secure Authentication and authorization

Grafana Mimir authentication and authorization

Grafana Mimir is a multi-tenant system where tenants can query metrics and alerts that include their tenant ID. The query takes the tenant ID from the X-Scope-OrgID parameter that exists in the HTTP header of each request, for example X-Scope-OrgID: <TENANT-ID>. You can federate queries across multiple tenants by using true in -tenant-federation.enabled=true. When you specify tenant IDs, separate them with a pipe (|) character in the X-Scope-OrgID header, as in the example X-Scope-OrgID: tenant-1|tenant-2|tenant-3.

To protect Grafana Mimir from accidental or malicious calls, you must add a layer of protection such as a reverse proxy that authenticates requests and injects the appropriate tenant ID into the X-Scope-OrgID header.

Configuring Prometheus remote write

For more information about Prometheus remote write configuration, refer to remote write.

With an authenticating reverse proxy

To use bearer authentication with a token stored in a file, the remote write configuration block includes the following parameters:

yaml Copy

authorization:
  type: Bearer
  credentials_file: <PATH TO BEARER TOKEN FILE>

To use basic authentication with a username and password stored in a file, the remote write configuration block includes the following parameters:

yaml Copy

basic_auth:
  username: <AUTHENTICATION PROXY USERNAME>
  password_file: <PATH TO AUTHENTICATION PROXY PASSWORD FILE>

Without an authenticating reverse proxy

To configure the X-Scope-OrgID header directly, the remote write configuration block includes the following parameters:

yaml Copy

headers:
  "X-Scope-OrgID": <TENANT ID>

Extracting tenant ID from Prometheus labels

In trusted environments where you want to split series on Prometheus labels, you can run cortex-tenant between a Prometheus server and Grafana Mimir.

Note: cortex-tenant is a third-party community project that is not maintained by Grafana Labs.

When proxying the timeseries to Grafana Mimir, you can configure cortex-tenant to use specified labels as the X-Scope-OrgID header.

To configure cortex-tenant, refer to configuration.

Disabling multi-tenancy

To disable multi-tenant functionality, pass the following argument to every Grafana Mimir component:

-auth.multitenancy-enabled=false

After you disable multi-tenancy, Grafana Mimir components internally set the tenant ID to the string anonymous for every request.

To set an alternative tenant ID, use the -auth.no-auth-tenant flag.

Note: Not all tenant IDs are valid. For more information about tenant ID restrictions, refer to About tenant IDs.