Environment Summary
Most companies know they have a problem with tags. Most don’t know where to begin to fix the problem. What we like to do is start people off with an Environment Summary. You can get an overview of what your tag environment looks like. You can find out how many taggable resources you have, how many tags you actually have on those resources, the average number of tags per resource, and your overall tag health score. The overall tag health score is a very important metric because it gives you an indication of the health and completeness of your tag environment. Let’s take a closer look at your tag health score.
Tag Health
Your Tag Health score has three components: Coverage, Compliance, and Clarity. Your coverage score measures how many of your resources are actually being tagged. Most companies are only tagging a fraction of the available resources. If you’re not taking the time to tag all of your resources, you lose the ability to do things like aggregate cost and do different types of analysis based off of those tags.
Compliance measures your compliance with tag policies. Tag policies help set the standard of what you want your tags to look like in terms of syntax, content, and things of that nature. What we do with Tag Manager is evaluate every single tag on every single resource and measure its compliance against your tag policies to come up with your overall compliance score.
The final component is clarity. Clarity refers to all things related to syntax. Let’s say you have five versions of an application key. One with a capital ‘A,’ one with a lower case, and a couple are misspelled. Tag Manager has very sophisticated algorithms that identify those inconsistencies. Then using the Tag Consolidation tool, you can unify all of those mislabeled tag keys into a single, standard name.
Tag Health Components
Your tag health score is designed to help you understand where you have problems. Tag Manager gives you all the tools to fix each of these problems. One of these tools is the ability to break down your tag health score by components. Here you see your score broken down by resource type. You can clean up EBS volumes, EC2s, or RDS. You can also change your perspective and view by ‘Owner.’ You can then sort by the Overall Tag Health score by low to high. This will show you how well each owner is tagging their resources. You can also view by application. Here you can continue to filter down to very specific details to find your problems.
Tag Consolidation
Let’s take a look at Tag Consolidation. You can click on Tag Intelligence in the top left, then Tag Consolidation. Here you can clean up any of the syntax issues with your tag keys. Here you can see there are two versions of the tag key ‘application.’ There are 72 resources with the correct spelling of ‘application’ and 11 that have a lower case ‘a.’ We’re going to change these 11 to have a capital ‘a’ to match the other 72. Side note: One of the complexities here that isn’t obvious, is that these may be spread across hundreds of accounts or multiple regions within those accounts. Tag Manager gives you the ability to clean up all of these at one time. To update, check the box next to the lower-case version of application and click ‘update keys.’ In the top right you can click ‘rename to’ ‘application’ with a capital ‘A.’ Click Review. This will take you over to Tag Explorer. Here it will list all the individual resources. It lists the current state and what the future state will be. It shows you that we’re going from ‘application’ with a lower-case ‘a’ to ‘Application’ with an upper-case ‘A’. I can click ‘Update Tag Keys’ in the bottom right to update all of these in one motion. Now you can go back to Tag Intelligence and then Tag Consolidation and you can see all 83 are tagged with ‘Application’ with a capital ‘A’.
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