You must carefully plan and implement an appropriate tagging strategy based on your organization's IT structure and goals to maximize Automation Assembler functionality and minimize potential confusion.

While tagging serves several common purposes, your tagging strategy must be tailored to your deployment needs, structure, and goals.

Best practices for tagging

Some general characteristics of an effective tag strategy:

  • Design and implement a coherent strategy for tagging that relates to the structure of your business and communicate this plan to all applicable users. A strategy must support your deployment needs, use clear human readable language, and be understandable to all applicable users.
  • Use simple, clear, and meaningful names and values for tags. For instance, tag names for storage and network items should be clear and coherent so that users can readily understand what they are selecting or reviewing tag assignments for a deployed resource.
  • Though you can create tags using a name with no value, as a best practice, it is more appropriate to create an applicable value for each tag name, as this makes the tag usage clear to other users.
  • Avoid creating duplicate or extraneous tags. For example, only create tags on storage items that relate to storage issues.

Tagging implementation

Map out your primary considerations for a basic tagging strategy. The following list shows typical considerations to consider when mapping your strategy. Be aware that these considerations are representative rather than definitive. You might have other considerations that are highly relevant to your use cases. Your specific strategy must be appropriate for your specific use cases.
  • How many different environments do you deploy to. Typically, you will create tags that represent each environment.
  • How are your compute resources structured and used to support deployments.
  • How many different regions or locations do you deploy to. Typically, you will create tags, at the profile level, that represents each of these different regions or locations.
  • How many different storage options are available for deployments, and how do you want to characterize them. These options should be represented by tags.
  • Categorize your networking options and create tags to accommodate all applicable options.
  • Typical deployment variables. For example, how many different environments do you deploy to. Typically, many organizations have Test, Dev, and Production environments at a minimum. You will want to create and coordinate constraint tags and cloud zone capability tags that match so that you can easily set up deployments to one or more of these environments.
  • Coordinate tags on network and storage resources so that they make logical sense in context of the network and storage profiles in which they are used. The resource tags can serve as a finer level of control over the resource deployment.
  • Coordinate cloud zone and network profile capability tags, and other capability tags, with constraint tags. Typically, your administrator will create capability tags for cloud zones and network profiles first, and then other users can design cloud templates with constraints that match these capability tags.

After you understand the important considerations for your organization, you can plan appropriate tag names that address these considerations in a logical manner. Then, create an outline of your strategy and make it available to all users with privileges to create or edit tags.

As a useful implementation approach, you can begin by tagging all of your compute infrastructure resources individually. As noted, use logical categories for tag names that relate to the specific resource. For instance, you might tag storage resources as tier1, tier2, etc. Also, you might tag compute resources based on their operating system, such as Windows, Linux, etc.

After you tag resources, you can then consider the approach to creating tags for cloud zone and storage and network profiles that best suits your needs.