You don’t Know How to Use Azure Tags Effectively

Are you wondering how can you separately track the billing of your resources allocated in same subscription? Did you think you could save money by turning off your DEV Virtual Machines over weekends, holidays or everyday evening? In this article I will discuss with you how can you achieve all of these by using Azure tags effectively.

Azure Tags

Azure has tags that can be applied to some resource. Tag has key and value. Key can is case-insensitive however, the value of the tag is case-sensitive. You can use JSON object to store as the value of the tag as well.

Example of tag is ProductOwner is the tag and it’s value could be Arun or Yogesh depending on the team.

Question arises why do I create tag and how Tags are helpful?

Well you can use tags in below scenarios to improve your cloud experiences:

1. Use an Environment Tag to rack deployment
2. Use Environment tag in Automation Runbooks`
3. Use a CostCenter tag to track osts.
4. Use Azure Policy to enforce ag usage
5. Don’t clobber your tags in the zure CLI

Create Environment tag to Track Deployment

Key	Value
Environment:	DEV , QA , UAT, PRO etc

Suppose, now if you want to share DEV, QA, UAT environments in the same subscriptions then you can quickly identify resources per environment.

Use Tags in Automation Runbooks

You can use environment tag to set up Runbook to automatically shut off all DEV Virtual Machines in the weekend and the evenings. That will reduce the monthly bill.

Use CostCenter Tag to track Cost

Apply CostCenter tag to the allocated resources to the team or department that are responsible for the cost of those resources. Then you can go to Azure Cost Management search cost for the tags by CostCenter tag.

Example:

Key	Value
CostCenter	Finance or IT or Sales

Use Azure Policies to enforce tag Usages

Azure policy can be applied from management group. MS has built-in policy to enforce tag on resource. Once you apply the policy then after 24 hours you will go to the compliance report and notice how many resources are not applied tags.

Don’t Clobber your tags in the Azure CLI

Before add/delete/update a tag on the resource using Azure CLI. Pull all the tags in the resource and then perform the action.

Reference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUEbKxsqr7Q

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Rupesh Tiwari
Founder of Fullstack Master
Email: rupesh.tiwari.info@gmail.com
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