Anatomy of an Access Approval request

This page describes the information contained in Access Approval requests.

Sample Access Approval request

The following code is a sample Access Approval request:

{
  "name": "projects/123456/approvalRequests/xyzabc123",
  "requestedResourceName": "projects/123456",
  "requestedReason": {
    "detail":  "Case number: bar123"
    "type":  "CUSTOMER_INITIATED_SUPPORT"
  },
  "requestedLocations": {
    "principalOfficeCountry": "US",
    "principalPhysicalLocationCountry": "US"
  },
  "requestTime": "2018-08-28T19:07:12.286Z",
  "requestedExpiration": "2018-09-02T19:07:11.877Z"
}

Request fields

An Access Approval request contains the following fields:

Field Description
Resource The location of the resource for which the Google employee is requesting access. Google personnel can request access at the level of a resource or at the level of a specific project. Approving access for a given resource also grants access to any child resources underneath. For example, if you make an approval for projects/123456/buckets/bucket-123 project, an access request for projects/123456/buckets/bucket-123/objects/file-1 child resource is also allowed.
Request time The time at which Access Approval sent the access request to you.
Access expires The time at which the requested access expires.
Office location Access is only allowed if the accessor has a permanent desk in this location. Location is one of an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, a 3-character continent identifier, or ANY to indicate that any location is allowed.
Physical location Access is only allowed if the accessor is physically located in this location. Location is one of an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, a 3-character continent identifier, or ANY to indicate that any location is allowed.
Reason The reason for the access. For more information, see Justification codes in Access Transparency logs.

For more information about the fields in an access request, see Resource: ApprovalRequest.

Historical Access Approval requests

Access Approval lets you view all the historical approved, auto-approved, dismissed, and expired access requests. You can use the Google Cloud console or cURL to view historical access requests. For instructions, see Viewing historical Access Approval requests.

A historical access request log contains all the access request fields, and mentions the status and the response time of the request.

The following sections describe the Approval status and Response time fields.

Status of an access request

An Access Approval request has one of the following statuses:

Status Description
pending Indicates that the access request is awaiting your action.
approved Indicates that you approved the access request.
dismissed Indicates that you dismissed the access request.
expired Indicates that the duration of access approved by you has expired.
auto-approved Indicates that Google personnel made a time-sensitive access to customer content. To make these accesses, Google personnel had to curtail the usual flow of getting customer approval. Google personnel are required to make these accesses for a production outage investigation or legal request.

Previously, these accesses didn't trigger an Access Approval request. To ensure transparency about these accesses, Access Approval logs these accesses with the auto-approved status. You can view the details about these accesses in the History requests sections in the Access Approval page on Google Cloud console.

The auto-approved accesses also generate the usual set of Access Transparency logs. Access Transparency logs provide information about the affected resources and the time of the action. For more information about viewing Access Transparency logs, see Understanding and using Access Transparency logs. For the list of actions that don't trigger an Access Approval request, see Access Approval exclusions.

Response time

This field indicates the time at which you approved or dismissed the access request. A response time isn't applicable for requests that got dismissed due to inactivity.

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