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Configuring and Scheduling the Permissions Collection

Permissions can be analyzed to determine the application permissions of an out-of-the-box application, provided you have defined an identity store for File Access Manager to use in its analysis, and you have run a crawl for the application.

The permission collector is a software component responsible for analyzing the permissions in an application.

The Central Permission Collector Service is responsible for running the Permission Collector and Crawler tasks.

If the “File Access Manager Central Permission Collector” wasn’t installed during the installation of the server, this configuration setting will be disabled.

Configuring the Permission Collection

  1. Open the edit screen of the required application.
    • Go to Admin > Applications.
    • Scroll through the list, or use the filter to find the application.
    • Select the edit icon edit icon on the line of the application.
  2. Select Next until you reach the Crawler & Permissions Collection settings page. The actual entry fields vary according to the application type.

When entering this page in edit mode, you can navigate between the various configuration windows using the Next and Back buttons.

  • Central Permissions Collection Service

    • Select a central permission collection service from the dropdown list. You can create permissions collection services as part of the service installation process. See section "Services Configuration" in the File Access Manager Administrator Guide for further details.

  • Skip Identities Sync during Permission Collection

    • Skip identity synchronization before running permission collection tasks when the identity collector is common to different connector.

    Note

    This option is checked by default.

You can now schedule a task.

Scheduling a Task

To create a schedule:

  1. Select Create a Schedule.
  2. The system will provide a Schedule Name in the format {appName} - {type} Scheduler. Choose to keep or override this suggestion.

  3. Select a scheduling frequency from the dropdown list.

    Schedule Frequency Options
    • Run After - Create dependency of tasks. The task starts running only upon successful completion of the first task.
    • Hourly - Set the start time.
    • Daily - Set the start date and time.
    • Weekly - Set the day(s) of the week on which to run.
    • Monthly - Set the day of the month on which to run a task.
    • Quarterly - Set a monthly schedule with an interval of 3 months.
    • Half Yearly - Set a monthly schedule with an interval of 6 months.
    • Yearly - Set a monthly schedule with an interval of 12 months.

  4. Fill the Date and Time field with scheduling times. These fields differ depending upon the scheduling frequency selected.

  5. Select the Active checkbox to activate the schedule.
  6. Select Next.

Configuring and Scheduling the Crawler

Set or edit the Crawler configuration and scheduling

  1. Open the edit screen of the required application.
    • Go to Admin > Applications.
    • Scroll through the list, or use the filter to find the application.
    • Select the edit icon edit icon on the line of the application.
  2. Select Next until you reach the Crawler & Permissions Collection settings page. The actual entry fields vary according to the application type.

Create a Schedule

Setting the Crawl Scope

There are several options to set the crawl scope:

  • Setting explicit list of resources to include and / or exclude from the scan.
  • Creating a regex to define resources to exclude.

Including and Excluding Paths by List

To set the paths to include or exclude in the crawl process for an application:

  1. Open the edit screen of the required application.
    • Go to Admin > Applications.
    • Scroll through the list, or use the filter to find the application.
    • Select the edit icon edit icon on the line of the application.
  2. Select Next until you reach the Crawler & Permissions Collection settings page.
    The actual entry fields vary according to the application type.
  3. Scroll down to the Crawl configuration settings.
  4. Select Advanced Crawl Scope Configuration to open the scope configuration panel.
  5. Select Include / Exclude Resources to open the input fields.
  6. To add a resource to a list, type in the full path to include / exclude in the top field and select + to add it to the list.
  7. To remove a resource from a list, find the resource from the list, and select the x icon on the resource row.

Note

When creating exclusion lists, excludes take precedence over includes.

Excluding Paths by Regex

Set filters of paths to exclude in the crawl process for an application using regex:

  1. Open the edit screen of the required application.
    • Go to Admin > Applications.
    • Scroll through the list, or use the filter to find the application.
    • Select the edit icon edit icon on the line of the application.
  2. Select Next until you reach the Crawler & Permissions Collection settings page.
    The actual entry fields vary according to the application type.
  3. Select Exclude Paths by Regex to open the configuration panel.
  4. Type in the paths to exclude by Regex. See regex examples in the section below. Since the system does not collect BRs that match this Regex, it also does not analyze them for permissions.

Crawler Regex Exclusion Examples

The following are examples of crawler Regex exclusions:

Exclude all drives which start with one or more share names

Example Regex
Starting with \\server_name\shareName \\\\server_name\\shareName$
Starting with \\server_name\shareName or \\server_name\OtherShareName \\\\server_name\\(shareName|OtherShareName)$

Include ONLY shares that start with one or more share names

Example Regex
Starting with \\server_name\shareName ^(?!\\\\server_name\\shareName($|\\.*)).*
Starting with \\server_name\shareName or \\server_name\OtherShareName ^(?!\\\\server_name\\(shareName|OtherShareName)($|\\.*)).*

Narrow down the selection:

Example Regex
Include ONLY the C$ drive shares: \\server_name\C$ ^(?!\\\\server_name\\C\$($|\\.*)).*
Include ONLY one folder under a share: \\server\share\folderA ^(?!\\\\server_name\\share\$($|\\folderA$|\\folderA\\.*)).*
Include ONLY all administrative shares ^(?!\\\\server_name\\[a-zA-Z]\$($|)).*

Notes

  • To write a backslash or a Dollar sign, add a backslash before it as an escape character.
  • To add a condition in a single command, use a pipe character “|”.

Excluding Top Level Resources

Use the top level exclusion screen to select top level roots to exclude from the crawl. This setting is done per application.

Exclude top level resources from the crawl process

  1. Open the application screen Admin > Applications.
  2. Find the application to configure and select the drop down menu on the application line. Select Exclude Top Level Resources to open the configuration panel.

  3. Run Task

    • The Run Task button triggers a task that runs a short detection scan to detect the current top level resources.
    • Before running the task for the first time, the message above this button is:
      "Note: Run task to detect the top-level resources"
    • If the top level resource list has changed in the application while you are on this screen, select this button to retrieve the updated structure.

    • Once triggered, you can see the task status in Settings > Task Management > Tasks.

      Note

      This will only work if the user has access to the task page

    • When the task has completed, select Refresh to update the page with the list of top level resources.

  4. Select the top level resource list, and select top level resources to exclude.

  5. Select Save to save the change.

  6. To refresh the list of top level resources, run the task again. Running the task will not clear the list of top level resources to exclude.

    run task

Special Consideration for Long File Paths in Crawl

If you need to support long file paths above 4,000 characters for the crawl, set the flag excludeVeryLongResourcePaths in the Permission Collection Engine App.config file to true.

By default this value will be commented out and set to false.

This key ensures, when enabled, that paths longer than 4000 characters are excluded from the applications’ resource discovery (Crawl), to avoid issues while storing them in the SQLServer database.

When enabled, business resources with full paths longer than 4000 characters, and everything included in the hierarchical structure below them, will be excluded from the crawl, and will not be collected by File Access Manager. This scenario is extremely rare.

Note

You should not enable exclusion of long paths, unless you experience an issue.

  • Background
    • File Access Manager uses a hashing mechanism to create a unique identifier for each business resource stored in the File Access Manager database. The hashing mechanism in SQLServer versions 2014 and earlier, is unable to process (hash) values with 4,000 or more characters.
    • Though resources with paths of 4000 characters or longer are extremely rare, File Access Manager is designed to handle that limitation.
  • Identifying the Problem
    • When using an SQL Server database version 2014 and ealier.
    • The following error message in the Permission Collection Engine log file:
      System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): String or binary data would be truncated.
    • In all other cases, this feature should not be enabled.
  • Setting the Long Resource Path Key
    • The Permission Collection Engine App.config file is RoleAnalyticsServiceHost.exe.config, and can be found in the folder:
      %SailPoint_Home%\FileAccessManager\[Permission Collection instance]\
    • Search for the key excludeVeryLongResourcePaths and correct it as described above.