Assigning monitor stewards
Assigning stewards to a discovery monitor scopes the day-to-day discovery work — promoting staged resources, approving classifications, working the Action Center — to a specific set of users without granting them control over the monitor's configuration.
This guide covers the two ways to assign stewards on the monitor configuration form: enabling system steward inheritance and adding explicit stewards. For the underlying model, see Monitor stewardship.
Prerequisites
- A configured integration with at least one monitor. See Data Monitoring to create one.
- Users with a role eligible to be assigned as a steward (Owner, Contributor, Data Steward, Viewer, or Viewer + Approver). See Role-based access control.
- For inherited stewardship: the integration must be linked to a System, and that System must have data stewards assigned.
Inherit stewards from the linked system
Inheritance is the recommended default. It keeps the people who own a System in sync with the people who review its discovered data, so you don't have to maintain two separate lists.
- Open the monitor's configuration form (
Integrations → <integration> → <monitor> → Configure, or use Add Monitor when creating a new one). - Locate the Inherit system stewards toggle.
- Leave it on (the default for new monitors). Every current data steward of the linked System will be a steward of the monitor.
Fides keeps the inherited set up to date automatically. If you add or remove a data steward on the linked System, the monitor's inherited stewards change to match. If you re-link the integration to a different System, the inherited set is recomputed against the new System.
To stop inheriting, switch the toggle off and save. Inherited stewards are removed from the monitor; any explicit stewards you have assigned are unaffected.
Add explicit stewards
Use explicit stewards to assign someone who is not (or should not be) a steward of the linked System — for example, a privacy analyst who reviews discovery results for one specific datastore but does not own the System overall.
- On the monitor configuration form, locate the Monitor Stewards field.
- Pick one or more users from the list. The list includes any user whose role is eligible to be a monitor steward.
- Save the monitor.
Explicit stewards are managed by hand and are never modified by inheritance. Removing a user from the Monitor Stewards field removes only their explicit assignment — if the same user is also an inherited steward, they remain a steward via that path.
Combining explicit and inherited stewardship
The two sources are independent. A user can be both an explicit steward and an inherited steward of the same monitor at the same time, and the two assignments are tracked separately. This lets you:
- Keep inheritance on for everyday governance, and add a small number of explicit stewards for monitor-specific reviewers.
- Disable inheritance entirely on a sensitive monitor and curate the steward list by hand.
- Pre-assign an explicit steward whose System-steward status is not yet finalized, without losing the assignment when their System role changes.
What stewards can and can't do
Monitor stewards can act on the monitor's results — see Decisioning Staged Resources in the Action Center guide.
Monitor stewards cannot modify the monitor's configuration: they cannot change its schedule, its classification parameters, its integration, or its steward assignments, and they cannot delete the monitor. Those actions still require a user with broader permissions.
For the full breakdown, see Monitor stewardship.
Related
- Monitor stewardship — concept
- System stewardship — source of inherited stewards
- Data Monitoring — the broader monitor configuration workflow