Usage moderation and management

The current license model provides an in-depth and personalized approach to user and asset moderation, allowing you to match your Collibra experience to your organizational and budgetary requirements.

At the core of the license model are three user types:

User type	Description
Viewer	A Viewer license allows users to access and browse Collibra, add comments and ratings, create collections, and start workflows. With a Viewer license, users can search through business and technical content, typically to find curated data products in the Data Marketplace and perform a data product check-out. Viewer users have full viewing capabilities across Collibra, but administrators may restrict them to only see curated and approved content. They also have access to applications such as Glossary, Catalog, Data Marketplace, or Reference Data, allowing them to navigate through available content. When Viewer users spot missing or incorrect information, they can engage with data stewards and owners by commenting, rating, or utilizing workflows to ask questions, propose changes, suggest missing content, or report issues. You can have an unlimited number of users with Viewer licenses.
Contributor	In addition to the Viewer license, a Contributor license allows users to perform a deeper exploration of the platform to understand and interact with the metadata landscape: Request access to data products. Participate in data product improvement, curation, and certification workflows. Offer feedback on data product quality or issues related to data products. Assist Creator users with final certifications and approvals. Update asset tags. Execute classification rules. Conduct and submit assessments. Leverage data notebooks to write SQL-based queries to build insights on data products. They also have access to applications such as Guided Stewardship, Usage Analytics, or Data Helpdesk. You decide how many Contributor licenses you need.
Creator	A Creator license grants users full access to all available products and capabilities. In addition to platform administration, configuration, and customization, they can create, edit, and delete assets without restriction and take on the roles of business and data stewards: Manage the operating model, including users and subscriptions. Manage the organizational setup, including communities, domains, and responsibilities. Create, update, and delete assets and asset characteristics, including bulk import. Manage assessments and assessment templates. Manage and publish data notebooks. Manage Protect, classification, and tags. Access Settings, Workflow Designer, and Insights Data Access. A number of Creator licenses is already included in every package, and you can add more if required.

User type

Description

Viewer

A Viewer license allows users to access and browse Collibra, add comments and ratings, create collections, and start workflows. With a Viewer license, users can search through business and technical content, typically to find curated data products in the Data Marketplace and perform a data product check-out. Viewer users have full viewing capabilities across Collibra, but administrators may restrict them to only see curated and approved content. They also have access to applications such as Glossary, Catalog, Data Marketplace, or Reference Data, allowing them to navigate through available content. When Viewer users spot missing or incorrect information, they can engage with data stewards and owners by commenting, rating, or utilizing workflows to ask questions, propose changes, suggest missing content, or report issues.

You can have an unlimited number of users with Viewer licenses.

Contributor

In addition to the Viewer license, a Contributor license allows users to perform a deeper exploration of the platform to understand and interact with the metadata landscape:

Request access to data products.
Participate in data product improvement, curation, and certification workflows.
Offer feedback on data product quality or issues related to data products.
Assist Creator users with final certifications and approvals.
Update asset tags.
Execute classification rules.
Conduct and submit assessments.
Leverage data notebooks to write SQL-based queries to build insights on data products.

They also have access to applications such as Guided Stewardship, Usage Analytics, or Data Helpdesk.

You decide how many Contributor licenses you need.

Creator

A Creator license grants users full access to all available products and capabilities. In addition to platform administration, configuration, and customization, they can create, edit, and delete assets without restriction and take on the roles of business and data stewards:

Manage the operating model, including users and subscriptions.
Manage the organizational setup, including communities, domains, and responsibilities.
Create, update, and delete assets and asset characteristics, including bulk import.
Manage assessments and assessment templates.
Manage and publish data notebooks.
Manage Protect, classification, and tags.
Access Settings, Workflow Designer, and Insights Data Access.

A number of Creator licenses is already included in every package, and you can add more if required.

You can see an overview of the total number of licenses you are entitled to and their current consumption in Settings → Seats.

Note Disabled user accounts do not count towards your license consumption.

Learn more about user licenses.

Assets

The number of assets your platform can have is primarily determined by the number of Creator licenses. However if your organization relies more on automation, you can keep the Creator number to a minimum and add asset bundles.

The total number of assets is calculated as follows:

The number of Creator licenses included in your package or additionally purchased multiplied by 58,000 assets.
Additional asset bundles that you have purchased.

Learn more about the Assets page.

User and license management

License assignment is an automatic process. You cannot assign licenses individually. Instead, Collibra calculates the required license type for each user. At any moment, a user has the maximum license type required by any permission included in any role assigned to them directly or through group membership. For example, if a user has a role with a permission that requires a Contributor license and another role with a permission that requires the Creator license, that user occupies a Creator seat.

Roles and permissions

A permission is the authorization to access a Collibra application or function, or to view or edit a resource. Each permission has a required license and this is the only direct connection to a license type.

Important You cannot assign permissions directly to users.

A role is a collection of permissions that you can assign to user groups or, exceptionally, to users. Roles inherit the highest license type from the permissions they contain. Groups inherit the highest license type from the roles they have while users inherit the highest license type from the groups they belong to, determining the license consumption.

The diagram demonstrates how Collibra determines license types at different levels for global roles and permissions:

Role A has aCreator license from Permission A, while Role B and Role C have a Contributor license from Permission C and Permission E, respectively.
Role A and Role B are assigned to Group A, which inherits the higher Creator license from Role A.
Role C is assigned to Group B, which inherits the Contributor license.
User A is a member of Group A and inherits the Creator license from Group A.
User B is a member of both Group A and Group B and inherits the higher Creator license from Group A.
User C is a member of Group B and inherits the Contributor license from Group B.

Learn more about roles and permissions.

Tracking changes

As you make changes that have an impact on the license consumption, the Updating Responsibilities dialog box presents a summary of the changes to the number of Contributor or Creator seats as a result of the action you are about to perform.

Use the Assets and Seats reports to keep an eye on the past and current usage. For a more detailed analysis of events that led to changes in the number of Contributor and Creator seats, use the daily License Change History.

Resource permissions and responsibilities

A responsibility is the assignment of a resource role to one or more users or user groups for a resource. Based on their responsibilities, users can act on the permissions assigned to them via the resource role.

For future maintainability and higher transparency, add responsibilities as high up in the organization hierarchy as possible and rely on the automated inheritance of responsibilities from communities and domains to the individual assets.

Opt for assigning responsibilities to groups rather than individuals at the highest possible level. As your governance structure stabilizes, leverage the Request responsibility feature to:

Assign individual responsibilities for short-term changes.
Add the requesters to groups that already have the necessary responsibilities for long-term changes.
Spread the governance management effort to the approver roles of the Request responsibility feature.
Tip Manage the approvers and their backups in Settings → Roles and Permissions → Additional Settings.

Managing users

Use SCIM to manage users and, more importantly, groups. Instead of manually creating groups and group memberships, manage them via your Identity Provider. Once the groups are provisioned, start from one of the following scenarios, depending on your use case.

Simple scenario

This approach allows you to get started immediately and have a very tight grip on license consumption. It's easy to set up, requires low maintenance, and is transparent in understanding license consumption to ensure compliance with the license policy:

Create three global roles for Viewers, Contributors, and Creators.
Assign permissions based on the required licenses to your three roles.
Use the out-of-the-box Everyone group for the Viewers role, which requires no maintenance because all users are part of this group by default.
Add your SCIM groups to Contributors and Creators as needed.

Complex scenario

This approach leverages the global roles that come with Collibra and is suitable for complex organizational setups where different departments are responsible for different parts of the platform, and different types of users or groups need access to various applications:

Where relevant, use the out-of-the-box Everyone group for global roles with Viewer permissions.
Add your SCIM groups to the required out-of-the-box roles.

General considerations

When opting for out-of-the-box global or resource roles, use as few as possible and add extra permissions as needed if you don't require a detailed split of responsibilities. Because you cannot delete roles that are included with Collibra, once you have reached the desired setup, mark any remaining global roles as not in use to let your colleagues know to avoid them. You can disable resource roles that you don't need in Settings → Roles and Permissions → Resource Roles.

Note We use some of the out-of-the-box roles in our workflows. If you do not use a particular role included in a workflow, modify the workflow configuration variables to include a similar role that you are using.

Allowance limits

The Seats and Assets settings pages help you monitor your license and asset consumption. Collibra calculates consumption as follows:

The seats and assets data is refreshed every hour.
Consumption is evaluated every week.
A week starts at 00:00 UTC every Monday.
You benefit from a 20% buffer to bring back usage within the allowance of your package.
Exceeding 120% usage for more than 9 consecutive weeks triggers limitations for user or asset management.
The limitations are automatically removed after one week of usage below the 120% threshold.

Important Since consumption is evaluated weekly and each week starts on Monday, if you exceed the threshold on a Friday, that entire week counts as out of compliance.

Seats

Viewer seats are unlimited, while the number of Contributor and Creator seats depend on your subscription. For each subscription a license key is uploaded to the applicable environment. The license key contains package details such as included users by type, asset allowance, and product and capabilities included or purchased on top of the package.

The Seats page allows you to see when your organization exceeds the number of assigned seats so that you can take action by purchasing more seats or by removing permissions from users or groups to reduce the number of occupied seats.

The number of allocated Contributor or Creator seats has a 20% buffer to help you manage consumption after exceeding the purchased amount. When the assigned seats go over 120% for these licenses for more than 9 consecutive weeks, you can no longer:

Assign responsibilities to a role that requires that license.
Add members to a global role that requires that license.
Add users to a group with a role that requires that license.

Assets

As your organization reaches the maximum number of allocated assets, you can take action to purchase additional asset bundles or add more users to increase your asset allowance.

The number of allocated assets has a 20% buffer to help you manage consumption after exceeding the entitled amount. When the total number of assets goes over 120% for more than 9 consecutive weeks, you can no longer:

Manually create new assets using the global create function.
Import assets in bulk through the asset import wizard.
Register new data sources in Data Catalog and Data Lineage.

Options

Managing usage means either reducing the number of seats or assets, or purchasing additional packages to accommodate current usage. Using your Identity Provider to manage groups and adopting simple group schemas allow you to perform bulk changes that impact seat consumption meaningfully.

In exceptional cases, such as when administrators who manage users are not available to bring usage back to normal, contact the Collibra Account Team.