Tags

Tags are organization-wide labels you apply to hosts, services, subnets, VLANs, sites, daemons, credentials and most other entities, then use to filter entity lists and the topology. Deleting a tag removes it from every entity that carried it.

Tag groups allow one tag per entity

A tag can belong to a tag group, and an entity holds at most one tag from each group. Adding a tag from a group replaces the one the entity already had from that group. Use a group for anything with exactly one value per entity, such as an environment: Production, Staging, Development. A tag with no group has no limit.

A group lists its tags either in an order you set or by name. Tag pickers, the topology's tag filters and tables follow it, so Status reads Planned, Active, Decommissioning, Decommissioned rather than alphabetically. Application lists by name, since applications have no sequence.

Every entity table has a column for each tag group that applies to it, hidden until you show it from the column menu. Sorting or grouping by that column follows the group's order, and its filter picks from the group's tags.

Besides Status (below), new organizations start with Environment, Criticality and Management groups. They work like any group you create, so you can rename them, change their tags or delete them.

A group can be limited to some entity types

A tag group you create applies to every taggable entity until you limit it. Limit a group to hosts, for example, and its tags can only go on hosts: pickers on other entities don't offer them, and the API refuses them. Status and Visibility set their own entity types, which you can see but not change.

You can't narrow a group while its tags are on an entity type you're removing. Take the tags off those entities first; the error says how many of each type hold them.

Status is a built-in group for an asset's lifecycle

Status is a built-in tag group, like Application. It starts with four tags: Planned, Active, Decommissioning and Decommissioned. You can rename, recolor, reorder or delete those tags and add your own. The group itself always exists, keeps its order, can't be renamed, and no other group can be named Status.

Status applies to every entity type that has no status of its own. Daemons, discoveries and API keys already show one (a daemon's health, a discovery's schedule or result, a key's expiry), so Status tags don't go on them.

Visibility keeps entities off every topology

Visibility is a built-in group whose tags hide what they're on. A host, service or subnet holding a Visibility tag is left out of every topology, including snapshots and shares. Hiding a host also hides the addresses and services drawn inside it. The group starts with one tag, Hidden, and any tag you add to it hides too.

Use it for devices that never belong on the network map, such as smart lighting. To hide something in one view only, use that view's tag filter instead. The topology's tag filter shows the Visibility tags as always applied, so you can see why something is missing.

Application tags

Application is a built-in tag group. An application tag answers "what is this part of?" rather than "what is this like":

• A host or service carries at most one, as with any tag group.
• A service inherits its host's application tag. A host tagged billing lends that to every service on it, without tagging each one.
• Tagging a service directly overrides what it inherited. Use this for the service on a shared host that belongs to something else.

This inheritance is what the Application perspective groups on. Each application tag becomes a container, and services fall into it by their own tag or their host's. A host running one thing needs a single tag; only the exceptions need tagging individually.

Managing tags and groups

Tags live under Platform > Tags, and you can also create one while editing any entity. A tag's Tag Group field sets its group: Application, Status, Visibility, an existing group, or a new one typed there.

Groups live under Platform > Tags > Tag Groups. Edit a group there to rename it, describe it, limit it to entity types, choose whether its tags have an order, and move them up and down. Deleting a group leaves its tags in no group.