What is impersonation?
Impersonation is a feature available to admins which allows them to browse the product "as if" they were another user. This can be extremely useful for debugging, validating end-user experiences, and confirming that your configuration settings are correct.
How do I use it?
Navigate to access control:
Identify a user who you want to impersonate:
Select them from the table, and you will have the option to "View as":
You will now have a banner at the top of the page, which shows you who you are impersonating, gives you the ability to switch that user, and allows you to pause. Pausing can be very useful if you identify a discrepancy, as you can pause, fix, and resume to validate that the changes are correct as intended.
When paused, you will see a visually distinct banner with a resume and dismiss button:
Note: Impersonation only allows you to view the application as another user. You cannot make mutative changes, edits, or personal settings changes.
Note: If your organization’s internal compliance or works council policies prohibit administrator impersonation, please contact our support team to completely disable this feature for your organization.
What are its limitations?
View only
As mentioned above, this feature is viewing only. This means you will be blocked from performing changes. This can result in a lot of notifications, request failures, and toasts when you click around the application:
We considered gracefully handling this by disabling all buttons in impersonation mode, however we felt that it would be disingenuous to not show the product as if you were the end-user. Therefore, you will have lots of buttons which are clickable but which will not succeed.
No AI assistant support
Chatting with the AI Assistant is a great candidate for impersonation, as it helps you understand the types of answers your business users will receive when interacting with it.
However, currently we haven't extended support to the AI Assistant. The reason is because the AI Assistant retains a record of chat histories, and we felt that it would be a violation of privacy to expose those histories to the administrator. Until we build support for chats which don't create a history, we decided to restrict impersonation support to AI Assistant. This should be improved in the future.
No ShiftX support
We have similarly restricted access to ShiftX during impersonation mode. While this has equally valuable benefits to the AI Assistant for testing & validation of the end-user experience, expanding support to ShiftX was beyond targeted scoping and we felt that the impersonation feature brought a lot of value to the core application & Discover. We didn't want to predicate that value on full support to ShiftX. We hope to also improve this in the future.
Cannot impersonate other admins, service accounts, or Ardoq employee accounts
There are certain limitations on who you cannot impersonate:
Admins cannot impersonate other admins. This is mostly about UX, as admins should see the same view of the product as other admins. However, we felt it doesn't make much sense to support this flow.
Admins cannot impersonate Service Accounts. This is also a UX decision, as Service Accounts cannot login to the product and can only be used via the API. If you wish to validate a Service Account's permissions, you can do so by selecting the "Assets" tab on their profile page.
Admins cannot impersonate Ardoq employee accounts. In certain cases, an Ardoq employee may be a member of your organization. While impersonation doesn't grant additional privileges that an admin cannot otherwise perform themselves, we added this restriction for defense-in-depth.