+++
title = "Overview"
description = "Overview for permissions"
keywords = ["grafana", "configuration", "documentation", "admin", "users", "datasources", "permissions"]
type = "docs"
aliases = ["/docs/grafana/latest/reference/admin", "/docs/grafana/latest/administration/permissions/"]
[menu.docs]
name = "Overview"
identifier = "overview-permissions"
parent = "permissions"
weight = 1
+++

# Permissions Overview

Grafana users have permissions that are determined by their:

- **Organization Role** (Admin, Editor, Viewer)
- Via **Team** memberships where the **Team** has been assigned specific permissions.
- Via permissions assigned directly to user (on folders, dashboards, data sources)
- The Grafana Admin (i.e. Super Admin) user flag.

## User

A *user* is a named account in Grafana. A user can belong to one or more organizations and can be assigned different levels of privileges through roles.

Grafana supports a wide variety of internal and external ways for users to authenticate themselves. These include from its own integrated database, from an external SQL server, or from an external LDAP server.

## Grafana Admin

This admin flag makes user a `Super Admin`. This means they can access the `Server Admin` views where all users and organizations can be administrated.

## Organization Roles

Users can belong to one or more organizations. A user's organization membership is tied to a role that defines what the user is allowed to do
in that organization. Grafana supports multiple *organizations* in order to support a wide variety of deployment models, including using a single Grafana instance to provide service to multiple potentially untrusted organizations.

In most cases, Grafana is deployed with a single organization.

Each organization can have one or more data sources.

All dashboards are owned by a particular organization.

 > Note: Most metric databases do not provide per-user series authentication. This means that organization data sources and dashboards are available to all users in a particular organization.

Refer to [Organization roles]({{< relref "../permissions/organization_roles.md" >}}) for more information.


## Dashboard and Folder Permissions

Dashboard and folder permissions allow you to remove the default role based permissions for Editors and Viewers and assign permissions to specific **Users** and **Teams**. Learn more about [Dashboard and Folder Permissions]({{< relref "dashboard_folder_permissions.md" >}}).

## Data source permissions

Per default, a data source in an organization can be queried by any user in that organization. For example a user with `Viewer` role can still
issue any possible query to a data source, not just those queries that exist on dashboards he/she has access to.

Data source permissions allows you to change the default permissions for data sources and restrict query permissions to specific **Users** and **Teams**. Read more about [data source permissions]({{< relref "datasource_permissions.md" >}}).
