Tag Sanitization #
Cloud providers, with the exception of AWS (where you must indicate which Tags you want to use as we documented previously), show all Tags in the cost reports. If the number of Tags is excessive, it can hinder visualization and productivity.
The first advantage of sanitization is to choose only the main Tags for FinOps . The second is to fix the spelling of the Tags to make Tag groups compatible and to fix the history.
The principle is simple: choose a ‘ main ‘ Tag name and associate variations with it.
Example : main tag, “product”. Variations: “Product”, “product” (with space in front), “Product”, “customer” (any variation being migrated).
To access this application, we provide an application in “ FinOps – Analytics ”:
With this application, located in “Costs – Analytics”, it is possible to map alternative names and values, consolidating legacy and/or incorrect spellings.
Tags in MultiCloud – Business Units #
As mentioned earlier, it is very important to define Tags in a format that is accepted by all public clouds.
Cloud8 allows you to manage Tags in a MultiCloud environment through the ‘ Business Units ‘ feature. By replicating the structure of your company/departments/clients, you can now count on a new ‘provider’ and gain all the cost tracking features – whether technical or business ( Tags ).
Tags common to all providers, such as “ costcenter ”, now have a consolidated report.
If providers have different currencies, Cloud8 takes care of converting them to Dollars or Reais and product costs and Tag costs are aligned and compatible.
Tag Compliance #
To ensure that all components are tagged and following your process definitions, we provide compliance rules within “ Best Practices ”.
You have all the flexibility to define different groups with rules and how you want to receive notifications:
- Channels : email, slack
- Frequency : immediate, daily, weekly, monthly
Important : The use of Untagged and Compliance goes beyond FinOps . It allows you to identify process failures.
- Are there components being created manually? (i.e. they appeared without tags or with incorrect tags);
- Did some automatic process ‘forget’ the Tags and need to be fixed?
Compliance in tag values. #
As previously described, monitoring and correction of untagged components can be done by applying “ Untagged ”. But how can we ensure that the values (in addition to the names) entered are also correct?
For example: we define that the Tags must be “ costcenter ”, “ products ”, “ environment ”, “ team ”. How can we ensure that the cost centers used in the Tags are correct and belong to a list? Ex: cc-0101 , cc-2341 , cc-7788 , etc. and that someone does not accidentally enter a wrong value?
Through Best Practices you can create your compliance policy . See the rule “ Resource with noncompliance tags ” and define name/values within the filters. Remember that the values are always case sensitive , so be careful with upper and lower case letters.
If a value is outside the defined list, you will be alerted via the notification channel you choose.
