Manage users and groups with SAML in Dynatrace SaaS

Dynatrace SaaS enables authentication through your organization's identity provider (IdP). If you want to use your organization's corporate credentials for authentication in Dynatrace, you can set up SAML to delegate authentication to your IdP.

SAML notice and limitations

Domain scope

SAML 2.0 is used for authentication and optionally for authorization. Based on the domain part of your corporate email address, Dynatrace can determine if SAML was configured for that domain and redirect to your company’s IdP for authentication.

Be aware that the SAML configuration affects all other accounts and users that share the same domain name.

If your company has several Dynatrace accounts and you are using the same domain to sign in for all of your accounts, then the other accounts will inherit the federation configuration and will use your identity provider for authentication. For instance, if you set up SAML federation on account A for domain mycompany.com and you have other accounts in Dynatrace also using mycompany.com to sign in (account B and C), then all other accounts (and all user sign-ons ending with mycompany.com) will use federation after you've activated SSO for mycompany.com in account A.

Mobile user access

SAML is mainly a protocol for Single-Sign-On (SSO) and Identity Federation, and does not provide features for regular user and permission synchronization.

Although we support on-the-fly creation of federated users for the first time they have authenticated to Dynatrace over your company's IdP, and federated user attributes update on every sign-on, additional actions are required to cover functionalities that are not within the scope of SAML. Specifically, if a federated user has been removed or deactivated in the customer Active Directory but not in Dynatrace, and if that user issued Oauth2 tokens (for access to the Dynatrace Mobile App) before losing access to Dynatrace, those tokens can remain valid for up to 30 days.

In order to remove all access, you need to remove users manually (or you can harness SCIM for automatic user management).

IdP requirements and specification

Your IdP needs to follow some basic SAML specification and security requirements to be compliant with Dynatrace SSO:

• The entire SAML message must be signed (signing only SAML assertions is insufficient and generates a 400 Bad Request response).
• The SAML protocol version is urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:protocol.
• The NameID format is urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:1.1:nameid-format:emailAddress.
• IdP response NotBefore and NotOnOrAfter assertion timestamps must consider system clock skew and must be set to at least 1 minute before and 1 minute after the current time (this particularly concerns AD FS default settings).
• The IdP response status code must be urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:status:Success.
• The SignatureMethod algorithm is http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmldsig-more#rsa-sha256.
• The DigestMethod algorithm is http://www.w3.org/2001/04/xmlenc#sha256.
• No assertion encryption.
• Just-in-Time provisioning is supported.
• Session timeout is not configurable and it is 1 hour.

Dynatrace SSO SP metadata is provided at https://sso.dynatrace.com/sso/metadata. If your IdP requires manual configuration and you don't have any XML parser extensions installed in your Chrome browser, we recommend that you view the metadata in Firefox.

Depending on the IdP type, these endpoints need to be configured as follows:

• https://sso.dynatrace.com:443/saml2/login for Entity ID / Audience Restriction
• https://sso.dynatrace.com:443/saml2/sp/consumer for Single Sign On URL / Destination URL / Recipient URL
• https://sso.dynatrace.com:443/saml2/sp/logout for Single Logout Service URL

If your IdP configuration screen contains the option to set SAML bindings for sign-in or sign-out, set it to urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:bindings:HTTP-POST.

SAML federated IdP configuration

To set up SAML for your domain

Create a fallback user account

Verify your ownership of the domain

Configure metadata

Test your configuration

Create a fallback user account

When a user signs in, Dynatrace checks the domain part of your corporate email address to determine whether SAML was configured for that domain. If there's a match, the sign-in is redirected to your company’s IdP for authentication. For a fallback, you need an email address that won't be redirected like this.

Your fallback account must be a non-federated user account that has the Manage users and Manage groups permissions and isn't covered by the federated sign-in.

1. Go to Identity management > User management and select Invite user to invite a user with a non-federated email address (an email address with a different domain from the one for which you are setting up SAML).
2. Specify the Manage users and Manage groups permissions in the invitation.

Verify your ownership of the domain

Before you can configure the domain for which you want to set up SAML, you need to prove ownership of the domain.

1. From the User menu, select Account settings.
2. Select Identity management > Single sign-on.
3. In the Verify domain section, enter the domain (for example, mycompanyname.com) for which you want to set up SAML.
   Multiple domains

   If users in your organization use more than one domain to sign in (for example, @mycompanyname.com and @uk.mycompanyname.com), you can add additional domains in additional rows and start verifying them all in parallel. Enter each domain in a different row.

4. For each domain you are verifying, select Copy and add the copied TXT resource record to your domain’s DNS configuration.
5. For each domain you are verifying, select Verify so that Dynatrace can verify that the record was added to your domain’s DNS.
   Propagation time

   It typically takes a few minutes for a record to propagate through the DNS system and the value to become available for Dynatrace to verify. In some cases, it may take up to 24 hours.

6. Each verified domain is added to the Verified domains list.

Configure metadata

After you create a fallback user account and verify your ownership of the domain, you can configure metadata.

1. Select Add to start configuring metadata.

2. Select Download XML to download the service provider (SP) metadata displayed in Service provider SAML 2.0 XML metadata.

   • Alternative: If you prefer, you can select the data in the Service provider SAML 2.0 XML metadata text box and copy it to your clipboard instead of downloading a file.

3. Register the data at your IdP and get the metadata of your IdP in XML format. The activities involved in this step depend on your IdP's interface and requirements.

   The X509Certificate appended to metadata needs to be signed using one of the following algorithms: SHA256withRSA, SHA384withRSA, or SHA512withRSA.

   IdP-specific instructions

   Dynatrace supports all IdPs that support the SAML 2.0 standard. For frequently used IdPs, we have IdP-specific instructions for registering the SP data at your IdP and getting the IdP metadata:

   • AD FS
   • Azure
   • Google Workspace
   • Okta

   These examples were correct at the time of writing, but Dynatrace has no control over changes that may be made by your IdP.

4. Select Choose file to upload the file containing the metadata of your IdP in XML format.

   • Alternative: If you prefer, you can paste the IdP metadata text directly into the Identity provider SAML 2.0 XML metadata box instead of uploading a file.

5. In the Attribute mapping section, specify the following:

   • First name attribute is the attribute that contains the first name of a user.
     For Microsoft Azure, it's http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/givenname.
   • Last name attribute is the attribute that contains the last name.
     For Microsoft Azure, it's http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/surname.
   • Security group claim attribute contains the groups/roles of a user from your IdP. This field is needed if you want to use SAML authorization.

6. Select Validate configuration to verify your settings.

   Important: Configuration validation is based on sign-in to Dynatrace via SSO. Validation can succeed only if:

   • You have privileges to sign in to Dynatrace.
   • You sign in to federation and are redirected to Dynatrace with the proper SAML message.
   • If validation is successful, Dynatrace displays a confirmation message. Close the message to return to Add configuration and then select Continue to display a summary of the validated configuration.
   • If there's an error in the Results list, select Edit configuration to fix it before continuing.

7. On Enable SSO, select Enable if you are ready to activate your configuration.
   Note: Don't sign out of Dynatrace yet in case any SSO issues occur.

8. Select Save & continue to save your configuration.

   Caution

   These configuration changes affect accounts and users that share the same domain name. For example:

   • If you've already configured SAML for a trial account using domain example.com and now you are configuring a production account that also uses domain example.com, the changes you submit now will apply to both accounts (you will overwrite the SAML configuration for the trial account when you save changes for the production account).
   • If you have users on another account whose email addresses also use the example.com domain, those users (all users whose email address ends with example.com) will have to sign in using the new IdP configuration.

Test your configuration

To test your configuration

1. Open a new browser instance and a new incognito window.
2. Go to sso.dynatrace.com and enter your email address.
3. Select Next.
   You should be redirected to your company’s IdP.
4. Provide your domain password.
   After successful authentication, you should be redirected to your Dynatrace environment's home page.

Troubleshooting:

• If you experience trouble, use the non-federated user (the fallback user account you created earlier) to sign in and change the configuration or disable federation.
• See Frequently asked questions below for answers to common questions.

SAML authorization

To use SAML authorization to manage permissions in Dynatrace, you need to specify the security group claim attribute in the attribute mapping configuration that contains the groups/roles of a user from your IdP, and then map groups from your IdP to groups in Dynatrace.

1. From the User menu, select Account settings.

2. Select Identity management > Group management and add a new group or find an existing group you want to map. You can filter the list by name and permissions.

   Important

   • We strongly recommend that you first create a new group (select Add group) to test whether SAML authorization works for that group.
   • Switching a LOCAL group to SAML removes all user assignments to that group.
   • Make sure you have a non-federated user with manage groups permission as discussed earlier.

3. Expand the Edit pane of the group to set up a mapping.

   • Group name—Make sure it matches the group you intend to edit.

   • Security group claims—A list of one or more federated group names returned by your IdP and mapped to this Dynatrace group.
     Select Add claim if you need to add a claim.
     This typically isn't a group display name. It can be, for example, an LDAP ID.

     When you specify security group claim for a group and select Save:

     • All existing users from that group are removed.
     • The group becomes a federated group. Assignment of users to that group is then controlled via the Security group claim attribute that you specified on Single-sign on.

   • Account permissions
     Account-related permissions for members of this group.

   • Environment permissions
     Environment-related permissions for members of this group.

   • Management zone permissions
     Management zone—related permissions for members of this group.

4. Select Save.
   Note: Don't sign out of Dynatrace yet.

5. Open a new browser instance and a new incognito window and sign in.

6. Go to account settings (select Account settings in the user menu) and verify that you can still see Identity management > User management and Identity management > Group management.
   If you can't see them, you've lost your Dynatrace admin permissions. Use the non-federated user account to change the configuration if you've run into any issues.

7. Dynatrace checks Security group claims of each user following successful sign-in. If a matching Dynatrace group is found, the user is added to the Dynatrace group and inherits all permissions of that group.

Note:

• When using SAML authorization, you don't have to invite users to Dynatrace. During sign-in, a user that doesn't already exist in Dynatrace is created automatically.
• Upon each sign-in, the Dynatrace group assignment is updated based on the values specified by the Security group claim attribute.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)