Resource Tags – Compliance and Cloud Governance

Resource tags can be used to logically organize the resources in your environment. Each tag comprises a key-value pair, where you will be adding a name and a corresponding value. For example, if your key or name for the tag is Environment, you could have different values like Production, QA, Development, or Testing. Adding these tags will help you understand which environment a resource belongs to. These tags are reusable, which means you do not have to create them for each resource. Once the tag is created, you can use it with applicable resources.

Use Cases

There are several use cases for tags; the following are some examples:

• You can group and filter your resources using tags. If you navigate to the All Resources blade, in real-world environments there will be thousands of resources. Tags can be used to filter resources across different regions and resource groups. Here tags can be leveraged for filtering (refer to Figure 2.24).

FIGURE 2.24 Sorting resources using tags

• In Azure Cost Management, you can use tags to see the cost of resources to which the tag is assigned (see Figure 2.25). This is useful if you have the tag Environment with the values Production, QA, and Development; using the tag, you can easily identify the cost related to production, QA, and development resources.
• When you download the usage report for your Azure consumption via REST API or from the portal, these tags will be present there are well. As this is a CSV file, you can easily apply filters and analyze the consumption.

FIGURE 2.25 Analyzing cost using tags

• If you are using Power BI connectors to create Azure consumption dashboards, then you can analyze the consumption using tags.

• Not all resource tags are available in Azure Cost Management. You can check the list of supported resources here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/management/tag-support

• Tags applied to resource groups will not be shown in Azure Cost Management because Azure charges you at the resource level. Tags at the resource group level are logical organization only. Also, tags applied at the resource group level are not inherited to resources by default.
• Tags at the resource group level can be applied to resources using Azure Policy. Refer to this website:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/policy/tutorials/govern-tags#modify-resources-to-inherit-the-costcenter-tag-when-missing