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Principal is a collective term for user accounts and service accounts. Both entities can be uniquely identified, authenticated, and authorized in CDF. Principals are unique within an organization and, therefore, also within a project in the organization. Principals can access data and create and run processes (transformations, Functions) in a CDF project.
  • A user account is associated with a person who wants to interact with CDF. Each user account has a user profile containing a unique user ID.
  • A service account is associated with an application or process that interacts with CDF, such as an extractor or Cognite Functions, rather than a person.

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Authentication for this API

Direct requests to the Principals API to auth.cognite.com, similar to organizations. The Principals API accepts only OAuth tokens issued by https://auth.cognite.com (such as those issued when logging into Fusion). You can also obtain a token by initiating a login flow against the authorization server directly. See the “Authorizations” sections for more information.

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User accounts

The Principals API lets you query user accounts in an organization and retrieve profiles.
Last modified on August 28, 2026