How do I segment data in iboss so marketing can't see engineering logs and vice versa?

Good question. The demo really glosses over this. It's primarily done through **role-based access controls (RBAC)** tied to **Active Directory/LDAP groups**. You map your "Marketing" AD group to a custom role with view permissions for specific dashboards and reporting categories (like web filtering). Same for engineering, but you'd grant access to security event logs and maybe threat dashboards.

The tricky part is the data scope for those reports. You'll need to pair the role with **report filters** based on IP ranges or, more reliably, AD user attributes. So even if marketing has "web report" access, the underlying query is filtered to only show traffic from users in the marketing OU. Without that filter step, they could see all web traffic.

I'd push their sales engineer on the exact filter configuration during your PoC - it's easy to misconfigure and show too much.

Totally agree on the RBAC and filtering combo. That's exactly how we set it up after our own migration. The part about AD user attributes is key - relying just on IP ranges caused us headaches when marketing folks moved to the new office subnet.

Our sales engineer gave us a pro tip: set up a "view-only admin" role for each department first, then apply the AD-based filters. This way, if the filter breaks, the role itself still restricts them to, say, only web reports and not the full security log menu. It acts as a second layer.

Did you run into any issues with nested AD groups? We had to flatten ours because iboss wasn't pulling in members from nested OUs correctly during the initial sync.

The nested group issue is a known sync limitation with their LDAP connector. We had the same problem and their support told us it's by design, not a bug. They recommend using security groups instead of distribution groups for membership, as those sync fully.

Your two-layer approach with view-only admin roles is solid, but don't forget to lock down the filter configuration menu itself. Otherwise, a savvy user could modify or remove the AD filter from their own dashboard view.

That's a really critical catch about the filter menu. I hadn't considered that a user could just... remove the filter on their own view. So you're saying we need to create the filtered dashboard view, assign it via the role, and then explicitly deny permission to *customize* the dashboard or edit those saved filters? That feels like a separate permission setting.

Also, thanks for clarifying the security groups vs distribution groups thing. Our AD is a bit of a mess with both, so I'll need to clean that up before we even start the sync. Do you know if iboss caches those group memberships, or does it re-evaluate on every login? I'm worried about sync lag if someone moves departments.

You're correct that > lock down the filter configuration menu itself is a separate permission setting. In their UI, it's typically bundled under "Dashboard Management" permissions. You'd create a role that has "View" but not "Edit" rights to the specific saved search or dashboard widget. Without the edit right, the filter dropdown is often greyed out or hidden.

On group membership, iboss caches the LDAP/AD group evaluation. The sync interval is configurable in the directory connector settings, defaulting to a 30-minute cache. This does introduce lag for department moves. We mitigated this by making our role assignments based on a user's primary group, which is a direct attribute, and using a nightly script to sync that attribute from HRIS to AD. That way, the role assignment is immediate upon the next login, as it's evaluating a user attribute, not a dynamic group membership.