Platform administration cheat sheet

This article aims to provide clear and opinionated guidance for account and workspace admins on recommended best practices. The following practices should be implemented by account or workspace admins to help optimize cost, observability, data governance, and security in their Azure Databricks account.

For in-depth security best practices, see this PDF: Azure Databricks Security Best Practices and Threat Model.

Best practice	Impact	Docs
Enable Unity Catalog	Data governance: Unity Catalog provides centralized access control, auditing, lineage, and data discovery capabilities across Azure Databricks workspaces.	- Set up and manage Unity Catalog
Apply usage tags	Observability: Have discrete mapping of usage to relevant categories. Assign and enforce tags for your organization’s business units, specific projects, and any other users or groups.	- Usage dashboards
Use cluster policies	Cost: Control costs with auto-termination (for all-purpose clusters), max cluster sizes, and instance type restrictions. Observability: Set custom_tags in your cluster policy to enforce tagging. Security: Restrict cluster access mode to only allow users to create Unity Catalog-enabled clusters to enforce data permissions.	- Create and manage cluster policies - Monitor cluster usage with tags
Use Service Principals to connect to third-party software	Security: A service principal is a Databricks identity type that allows third-party services to authenticate directly to Databricks, not through an individual user’s credentials. If something happens to an individual user’s credentials, the third-party service won’t be interrupted.	- Create and manage service principals
Set up automatic identity management	Security: Instead of adding users and groups to Azure Databricks manually, integrate directly with Microsoft Entra ID to automate user provisioning and deprovisioning. When a user is removed from Microsoft Entra ID, they are automatically removed from Databricks too.	- Sync users and groups automatically
Manage access control with account-level groups	Data governance: Create account-level groups so you can bulk control access to workspaces, resources, and data. This saves you from having to grant all users access to everything or grant individual users specific permissions. You can also sync groups from Microsoft Entra ID to Databricks groups.	- Manage groups - Control access to resources - Sync groups from MS Entra ID to Databricks - Data governance guide
Set up IP access for IP whitelisting	Security: IP access lists prevent users from accessing Azure Databricks resources in unsecured networks. Accessing a cloud service from an unsecured network can pose security risks to an enterprise, especially when the user may have authorized access to sensitive or personal data Make sure to set up IP access lists for your account console and workspaces.	- Create IP access lists for workspaces - Create IP access lists for the account console
Use Databricks Secrets or a cloud provider secrets manager	Security: Using Databricks secrets allows you to securely store credentials for external data sources. Instead of entering credentials directly into a notebook, you can simply reference a secret to authenticate to a data source.	- Manage Databricks secrets
Set expiration dates on personal access tokens (PATs)	Security: Workspace admins can manage PATs for users, groups, and service principals. Setting expiration dates for PATs reduces the risk of lost tokens or long-lasting tokens that could lead to data exfiltration from the workspace.	- Manage personal access tokens
Use budget alerts to monitor usage	Observability: Monitor usage based on budgets important to your organization. Budget examples include: project, migration, BU, and quarterly or annual budgets.	- Create and monitor budgets
Use system tables to monitor account usage	Observability: System tables are a Databricks-hosted analytical store of your account’s operational data, including audit logs, data lineage, and billable usage. You can use system tables for observability across your account.	- Monitor usage with system tables