Types of users

Owned by Cedric
Last updated: 18 Apr, 2024
6 min read

Valid from 5.0

The documentation below is valid from Datafari 5.0 upwards

Datafari proposes several roles and users, which have access to different sets of functionalities.

All these roles and users allow for a fine grain separation of duties, depending on your security requirements.

I. Search User roles:

1. Anonymous search user :

This is the most basic type of user. This user can only use the search functionality, and gets only two possible displays: the search bar (including autocomplete), and the results list (including facets). He has no access to functionalities such as alerts, statistics, saving favorites, or liking results. Also, since he is anonymous, he can only search through public data. Anything that has been labelled as restricted in terms of visibility (e.g. through ACLs for files) will not be searchable. If searching through these secured documents is required, the search user will need to switch to the "connected search user" role.

2. Connected search user :

This is a role similar to the anonymous search user role, except that it proposes more search functionalities. Obviously, the user can search using the search bar (including autocomplete) and the results list (including facets). Contrarily to the anonymous user, he has access to functionalities such as alerts and saving favorites. To reach these functionalities, the searcher needs to go in his administration panel, where he will see the required tabs. Also, he can search through secured documents. This means that when searching, Datafari does a security check on the documents and the user, and displays in the search result all the documents that the connected search user is allowed to see. Check the pages detailing the alerts functionnality and likes and favorites functionality to learn how to use it.

II. Management User roles:

1. Search expert :

This is a role, not a user, this means that you can assign it to any existing user, be it an imported or a non imported user. In case of an imported user, it needs to connect at least once to Datafari before being able to assign it a role.

The search expert is responsible for maintaining the relevance of Datafari, monitoring its usage, and managing its community of users. He ensures that queries with no clicks are not left alone. He checks the vitality of the system in terms of queries. He manages the promolinks. Beyond Datafari, he also ensures that people are aware of the tool, and he trains them if necessary. The expert has access to a range of functionalities from his administration interface: statistics through a graphical dashboard, promolinks management, synonyms and stopwords management, field based boosts, documents elevation, duplicate identifier, OCR activation, user management. We don't detail these functionalities here, they have dedicated sections in the documentation.

2. Search administrator :

This is a role, not a user, this means that you can assign it to any existing user, be it an imported or a non imported user. In case of an imported user, it needs to connect at least once to Datafari before being able to assign it a role.

The admin is responsible for maintaining the datafari system. He is the one in charge of restarting the server, monitoring the performances, checking the logs, ensuring that the hardware specs are still compatible with the number of documents indexed and the number of queries per second. He has a range of administration functionalities available from his admin panel: statistics through a graphical dashboard, logs search dashboard, system alerts (both for connectors and for the search engine), user alerts overall performance, user alerts scheduler activation, size limitations for the indexing phase. These functionalities are detailed in their respective sections of the documentation.

III. Dedicated Management Users:

1. Search Admin for Admin Analytics dashboards: searchadmin

By default, this user is called “searchadmin”.

The “searchadmin” user has access to all the dashboards present in the analytics system of Datafari (based on opendistro), including the ones for the “searchexpert” user (see below). Due to the way ELK is designed, not that you can see the full list of existing dashboards right away since we have configured access rights for some of them. You need to navigate within the ELK tenants (we have two, one for admin dashboards and one for search dashboards, named admin_tenant resp. searchexpert_tenant) and the pick the appropriate one, only then will you be able to see the respective list of dashboards. Note that some of these dashboards are directly accessible from the datafari admin UI.

The current list of searchadmin dashboards is:

  • Crawl failure files dashboard

  • Crawl monitoring dashboard

  • Logs Dashboard

  • MCF Dashboard

  • Solr Dashboard

  • Tomcat - Dashboard

  • ZooKeeper Dashboard

2. Admin for Admin Analytics system: admin

By default, this user is called “admin”. It allows for low level operations on the admin analytics system, please use with care and properly set a secured password.

3. Search Expert for Search Queries and Corpus Analytics dashboards: searchexpert

By default, this user is called “searchexpert”.

The “searchexpert” user has access to only the dashboards present in the searchexpert_tenant, not the ones from the admin_tenant that are restricted to the searchadmin user only. Since this user can see details about queries being made, he is to be considered as a user with high privileges, since he will be able to see names of documents that he may not have access to otherwise. Please consider with care to whom this user is given to.

The current list of searchexpert dashboards is:

  • Content Analysis

  • Content Analysis Over Time

  • Queries Analysis

  • Usage Statistics

4. Crawlers administrator:

By default, this user is called “admin”.

This user has access to the expert configuration user interface of the Datafari crawlers framework, based on Apache ManifoldCF.

5. Search engine administrator:

By default, this user is called “solradmin”.

This user has access to the expert configuration user interface of the Datafari Search engine, based on Apache Solr.

Valid from 2.0 up to 4.6

The documentation below is valid from Datafari v2.0 upwards

Starting with v2.0, Datafari proposes four distinct roles, which have access to different sets of functionalities.

Those four roles are: anonymous search user, connected search user, search expert, search administrator. The last two roles have been created to distinguish the activity of optimising the search engine from a relevance/usage perspective and from a technical perspective. Some details about what these four roles represent.

1. Anonymous search user :

This is the most basic type of user. This user can only use the search functionality, and gets only two possible displays: the search bar (including autocomplete), and the results list (including facets). He has no access to functionalities such as alerts, statistics, saving favorites, or liking results. Also, since he is anonymous, he can only search through public data. Anything that has been labelled as restricted in terms of visibility (e.g. through ACLs for files) will not be searchable. If searching through these secured documents is required, the search user will need to switch to the "connected search user" role.

2. Connected search user :

This is a role similar to the anonymous search user role, except that it proposes more search functionalities. Obviously, the user can search using the search bar (including autocomplete) and the results list (including facets). Contrarily to the anonymous user, he has access to functionalities such as alerts and saving favorites. To reach these functionalities, the searcher needs to go in his administration panel, where he will see the required tabs. Also, he can search through secured documents. This means that when searching, Datafari does a security check on the documents and the user, and displays in the search result all the documents that the connected search user is allowed to see. Check the pages detailing the alerts functionnality and likes and favorites functionality to learn how to use it.

3. Search expert :

The search expert is responsible for maintaining the relevance of Datafari, monitoring its usage, and managing its community of users. He ensures that queries with no clicks are not left alone. He checks the vitality of the system in terms of queries. He manages the promolinks. Beyond Datafari, he also ensures that people are aware of the tool, and he trains them if necessary. The expert has access to a range of functionalities from his administration interface: statistics through a graphical dashboard, promolinks management, synonyms and stopwords management, field based boosts, documents elevation, duplicate identifier, OCR activation, user management. We don't detail these functionalities here, they have dedicated sections in the documentation.

4. Search administrator :

The admin is responsible for maintaining the datafari system. He is the one in charge of restarting the server, monitoring the performances, checking the logs, ensuring that the hardware specs are still compatible with the number of documents indexed and the number of queries per second. He has a range of administration functionalities available from his admin panel: statistics through a graphical dashboard, logs search dashboard, system alerts (both for connectors and for the search engine), user alerts overall performance, user alerts scheduler activation, size limitations for the indexing phase. These functionalities are detailed in their respective sections of the documentation.