How to create and use groups to manage developer accounts in Azure API Management

  • Article

In API Management, groups are used to manage the visibility of products to developers in the developer portal. Products are first made visible to groups, and then developers in those groups can view and subscribe to the products that are associated with the groups.

API Management has the following immutable groups:

  • Administrators - Built-in group containing only the administrator email account provided at the time of service creation. Its membership is managed by the system; users can't be added to or removed from the group. The primary purpose of the administrator account is to access the developer portal's administrative interface to customize and publish the portal content. Any user that has Azure RBAC permissions to customize the developer portal can authenticate as the administrator to customize the portal.

    Note

    At any time, a service owner can update the administrator email settings that are used in notifications from your API Management instance.

  • Developers - Authenticated developer portal users fall into this group. Developers are the customers that build applications using your APIs. Developers are granted access to the developer portal and build applications that call the operations of an API.

  • Guests - Unauthenticated developer portal users, such as prospective customers visiting the developer portal of an API Management instance fall into this group. They can be granted certain read-only access, such as the ability to view APIs but not call them.

In addition to these system groups, administrators can create custom groups or use external groups in associated Microsoft Entra tenants. Custom and external groups can be used alongside system groups in giving developers visibility and access to API products. For example, you could create one custom group for developers affiliated with a specific partner organization and allow them access to the APIs from a product containing relevant APIs only. A user can be a member of more than one group.

This guide shows how administrators of an API Management instance can add new groups and associate them with products and developers.

In addition to creating and managing groups in the Azure portal, you can create and manage your groups using the API Management REST API Group entity.

Prerequisites

Complete tasks in this article: Create an Azure API Management instance.

Go to your API Management instance

  1. In the Azure portal, search for and select API Management services.

    Select API Management services

  2. On the API Management services page, select your API Management instance.

    Select your API Management instance

Create a group

This section shows how to add a new group to your API Management account.

  1. Select the Groups tab to the left of the screen.

  2. Click +Add.

  3. Enter a unique name for the group and an optional description.

  4. Press Create.

    Screenshot of creating a group in the portal. Once the group is created, it's added to the Groups list.

    • To edit the Name or Description of the group, click the name of the group and select Settings

    • To delete the group, select the name of the group and press Delete.

Now that the group is created, it can be associated with products and developers.

Associate a group with a product

  1. Select the Products tab to the left.

  2. Click the name of the desired product.

  3. Press Access control > + Add group.

  4. Select the group you want to add.

    Screenshot of adding a group to a product in the portal.

Once a product is associated with a group, developers in that group can view and subscribe to the product.

Note

To add Microsoft Entra groups, see How to authorize developer accounts using Microsoft Entra ID in Azure API Management.

To remove a group from the product, click Delete.

Screenshot of removing a group from a product in the portal.

Associate groups with developers

This section shows how to associate groups with members.

  1. Select the Groups tab to the left of the screen, and then select a group.

  2. Select Members > + Add.

  3. Select a member.

    Screenshot of adding a member to a group in the portal.

  4. Press Select.

Once the association is added between the developer and the group, you can view it in the Users tab.

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