As important as registering Tags in all components (whenever possible) is knowing what is not tagged . Cloud8 has features to investigate tags and discover what is missing tags .
Untagged Visualization – FinOps Analytics #
We created an option within the Tags report in FinOps Analytics called “Untagged“. By checking it, you can view the resources that do not have a tag, without leaving the analytical context. By bringing up “Untagged”, you have access to the same reports and alerts described previously.
This can answer questions like (and get you notified):
- How many of the product ProductName do not have the “environment” tag ?
- Which component IDs were not tagged with the “centrodecustos” Tag ?
Please note that this report is exploratory, showing product by product. If you want to show everything at once, see the next item that teaches you how to work with tags in bulk.
Untagged Online Report – FinOps Apps #
In the “ FinOps – Reports ” application, select the “ Untagged ” tab. Select the set of Tags you want to investigate and click “Filter”.
The Cloud8 Platform will bring the results divided into two groups:
- First group : Products/Services that do not support Tags . Note that these are generic services such as ‘ Support ‘, non-consumed services such as reserved instances, sending emails and technical services ( CloudTrail , requests for IDs that do not exist in S3, Dynamo , etc). In the case of Azure , these can be reserved instances (they do not have Resource Groups either). Here we bring the total for the month. In this group, you can apply a rule of three with weights to do the apportionment, divide between areas or assume that this cost is an IT cost .
- Second group : Products/services that support Tags , but do not have the chosen Tags . We bring the cost of the entire month or the cost of the last 48 hours. The idea is – once you adjust the Tags and run this report the next day – the adjusted component should no longer appear in this list (remember that providers do not apply Tags retroactively – Cloud8 can help correct this scenario, see more below);
For the current month, there is the option to bring the non- prorating cost for the entire month or just the last 2 days. The last 2 days option allows you to track the Tags . If you entered the Tags in the middle of the month, after a few days/hours they should no longer appear in this report.
Untagged Scheduled Report #
If you want to automatically receive components that do not have tags, you can create a scheduled report.
Go to Automations and in the “ Components ” list, select “ Reports ”. Create an event for the provider in question and choose the set of Tags you want to monitor as well as the frequency of receipt. We suggest, for example, scheduling a report every Monday afternoon that will contain a CSV of the components without the Tags . In this report, you can also choose one or more Tags, as in the “ FinOps Apps ” report .
Tips: #
- If you have a business unit, you get this report broken down by provider and can view all the components at once;
- Untagged monitoring allows you to proactively identify untagged components and not wait until the end of the month;
- Bonus : If you have automated provisioning processes ( Terraform , CloudFormation , Azure Templates , etc), and one of them doesn’t create the Tags , you’ll find out quickly and can fix the automation.
Tagged Online Report – Apps Costs #
In the “ FinOps – Analytics ” application, select the “ Tagged ” tab. Select the set of Tags you want to investigate and click “Filter”.
Cloud8 will bring all the components that have the set of tags you chose. You can export them in CSV format. In the case of Azure, we bring Resource Groups and for Oracle OCI , compartments.
Retroactive tags #
Once you create or modify a Tag for a component, providers do not retroactively tag the component. By not tagging in the past, there will be gaps and the historical tracking will not have data for these newly tagged components .
If you need to retroactively, Cloud8 has two options for configuring costs for the provider. Here’s how to enable them:
With one of these options turned on, every new or modified Tag is automatically propagated to the component’s past history, appearing in the next cost cycle and being removed from the ‘ untagged ‘ report for the month/period in question.
The second option of filling only the current month solves the case where you started to (re)standardize the Tags in the middle of the period and would like to fill the gaps only for this month, without overwriting the history. This option also solves cases where there is a delay in defining the Tags of a component and it is left without data for a few hours or days. Overwriting the current month ensures that there will be no such gaps.
Important #
1: Cloud8 assumes that the latest Tag is the ‘best’ Tag for the component. This overwrites previous months. If you have a database where the Tag has varied over time and it is important to keep this history, do not use this option. To update only some components, use the “ Import CSV with Tags ” option from “Untagged” in “ FinOps – Apps ” – more on this “ Missing Tags ” feature in the next section.
2: If you uncheck this option, Cloud8 returns historical values. So feel free to check this option and test.
3: We do not update the history directly on cloud providers, as they do not have an API for this action. The update is only done within our datalake .
4: If you have GKE, Tag propagation does not apply to items that belong to Kubernetes clusters.
Missing tags – how to fill in the history #
As we described earlier, it is possible to populate Tags retroactively, since we create a new Tag for an existing component. But what about components that no longer exist? Or components that we can’t overwrite the Tags and use the general retroactive method?
In this scenario, we provide a tool to export a CSV of all components that are missing one or more Tags of your choice. After completing the CSV, simply upload it and the system will complete the Tags retroactively.
The CSV contains information about the provider (if you are working with an organization, we bring all child accounts with the search criteria applied), region, component IDs, additional information such as name and whether it is connected to other components (e.g. disks), total cost for the month and the last date when a cost was incurred. This information will help you prioritize and better fill in the missing tags. Important: it is not mandatory to upload all the data. You can choose to prioritize the most expensive components and upload a spreadsheet with only them.
The CSV will bring information about components/items that do not support tags in the source provider and components that do not have tags. We are able to emulate tagging on items that do not support Tags . For example, sending email in AWS (SES) does not support Tags , but you can use an item from the spreadsheet that represents it ( Recipients-EC2 ) and associate the names/values you want. All subsequent reports will be consistent.
By applying the “apply tags and modify cloud components” option , Cloud8 will effectively add/modify tags directly on the provider. You can use this option for bulk tagging. Remember that the credential must have permission for these actions. Currently we can only do bulk tagging on AWS and Azure.
The “apply indefinitely in the following months” option allows us to automatically apply the chosen settings without having to enter the entire month and redo the process. This case is especially used when the component does not support Tags (as explained previously), for example, I want to classify all email sending with the Tag “ centrocusto=infra ”. Once configured for a month and this option is checked, the following months are already filled in.
It is important to select the Tags from the list. You cannot use “None of the Tags ” because we need the downloaded CSV to have the headers (tags) and columns for you to fill in the tags.
Note : Depending on the size of your account, this CSV may have thousands of rows. You can split this file into parts and upload them little by little. Also, feel free to apply all your knowledge of Excel, macros, formulas, to fill in the CSV before re-uploading it! 😊
Search for Tags in the list of components #
Component lists that have the ‘ Tags ‘ column either for viewing or exporting inventory support custom search. The syntax for searching is:
- Search by tag name: “Product”
- Search by value: “=mobile”
- Search for different name (untagged): “!Product”
- Search for different value (untagged): “!=mobile”
- Name and value combination: “Product=mobile”, “Product!=mobile”, “!Product!=mobile”, “!Product=mobile”, “!=mobile”, “!Product”
