Opal + Tailscale

Integration Overview

The Opal team is thrilled to partner with Tailscale so that users can easily make access requests to Tailscale resources using a self-service catalog, while admins can set up powerful approval and security guardrails. With the Tailscale + Opal integration, organizations can granularly manage SSH access with the following workflows:

Use cases

  • Allow users to request just-in-time access to resources on your tailnet from web and Slack
  • Set the right resource owners to delegate approvals to those with the most context
  • Configure day one access to Tailscale resources with groups from your identity provider
  • Automatically escalate and revoke privileged resource access based on on-call schedules e.g. PagerDuty or Opsgenie

How it works

Prerequisites

Before you begin this guide, you’ll need a tailnet and an Opal account. For information about creating a tailnet, see the Tailscale quickstart.

To use Opal with Tailscale:

  1. Generate a Tailscale API key from the keys page of the admin console.
  2. In Opal, add Tailscale as a new application.
  • Set the App Admin to the team that should manage the Tailscale app in Opal.
  • Enter a Description of how you use Tailscale, so colleagues know what they’re requesting access to. For example, “SSH access to the production network”.
  • Set the Tailnet name to be your tailnet’s domain name. You can find the name of your tailnet by opening the admin console and copying the name next to the Tailscale logo in the upper left corner of the page, e.g., example.com, myemail@example.com, or example.github.
  • Set the Tailscale API key to the API key you generated.

Determine which Tailscale ACL tags should be imported into Opal. This is done by the App Admin. For each ACL tag that is selected, Opal will automatically parse the existing access rules and SSH access rules that apply to that tag, and which groups have access to the tagged sources using those rules.

Now a user can request access or SSH access to a specific tag in Tailscale, or to join a specific group.

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