Roles and permissions for Azure Data Factory

APPLIES TO: Azure Data Factory Azure Synapse Analytics

This article describes the roles required to create and manage Azure Data Factory resources, and the permissions granted by those roles.

Roles and requirements

To create Data Factory instances, the user account that you use to sign in to Azure must be a member of the contributor role, the owner role, or an administrator of the Azure subscription. To view the permissions that you have in the subscription, in the Azure portal, select your username in the upper-right corner, and then select My permissions. If you have access to multiple subscriptions, select the appropriate subscription.

To create and manage child resources for Data Factory - including datasets, linked services, pipelines, triggers, and integration runtimes - the following requirements are applicable:

• To create and manage child resources in the Azure portal, you must belong to the Data Factory Contributor role at the Resource Group level or above.

  Note

  If you already assigned the Contributor role at the Resource Group level or above, you do not need the Data Factory Contributor role. The Contributor role is a superset role that includes all permissions granted to the Data Factory Contributor role.

• To create and manage child resources with PowerShell or the SDK, the contributor role at the resource level or above is sufficient.

Set up permissions

After you create a Data Factory, you may want to let other users work with the data factory. To give this access to other users, you have to add them to the built-in Data Factory Contributor role on the Resource Group that contains the Data Factory.

Scope of the Data Factory Contributor role

Membership of the Data Factory Contributor role lets users do the following things:

• Create, edit, and delete data factories and child resources including datasets, linked services, pipelines, triggers, and integration runtimes.
• Deploy Resource Manager templates. Resource Manager deployment is the deployment method used by Data Factory in the Azure portal.
• Manage App Insights alerts for a data factory.
• Create support tickets.

For more info about this role, see Data Factory Contributor role.

Resource Manager template deployment

The Data Factory Contributor role, at the resource group level or above, lets users deploy Resource Manager templates. As a result, members of the role can use Resource Manager templates to deploy both data factories and their child resources, including datasets, linked services, pipelines, triggers, and integration runtimes. Membership in this role does not let the user create other resources.

In publish context, Microsoft.DataFactory/factories/write permission applies to following modes.

• That permission is only required in Live mode when the customer modifies the global parameters.

Custom scenarios and custom roles

Sometimes you may need to grant different access levels for different data factory users. For example:

• You may need a group where users only have permissions on a specific data factory.
• Or you may need a group where users can only monitor a data factory (or factories) but can't modify it.

You can achieve these custom scenarios by creating custom roles and assigning users to those roles. For more info about custom roles, see Custom roles in Azure.

Here are a few examples that demonstrate what you can achieve with custom roles:

• Let a user create, edit, or delete any data factory in a resource group from the Azure portal.

  Assign the built-in Data Factory contributor role at the resource group level for the user. If you want to allow access to any data factory in a subscription, assign the role at the subscription level.

• Let a user view (read) and monitor a data factory, but not edit or change it.

  Assign the built-in reader role on the data factory resource for the user.

• Let a user edit a single data factory in the Azure portal.

  This scenario requires two role assignments.

  1. Assign the built-in contributor role at the data factory level.
  2. Create a custom role with the permission Microsoft.Resources/deployments/. Assign this custom role to the user at resource group level.

• Let a user be able to test connection in a linked service or preview data in a dataset

  Create a custom role with permissions for the following actions: Microsoft.DataFactory/factories/getFeatureValue/read and Microsoft.DataFactory/factories/getDataPlaneAccess/action. Assign this custom role on the data factory resource for the user.

• Let a user update a data factory from PowerShell or the SDK, but not in the Azure portal.

  Assign the built-in contributor role on the data factory resource for the user. This role lets the user see the resources in the Azure portal, but the user can't access the Publish and Publish All buttons.

Related content

• Learn more about roles in Azure - Understand role definitions

• Learn more about the Data Factory contributor role - Data Factory Contributor role.