In our previous post, we talked about resource groups and how they help us to organize resources. Tags are helpful as you look to improve organization of your Azure resources.

Tags allow us to associate custom details about our resource, in addition to the standard Azure properties. They are name/value pairs of text data. A resource can have up to 15 tags.

Why are tags important?

Tagging resources can help in monitoring to track down impacted resources. Monitoring systems could include tag data with alerts, giving you the ability to know exactly which resource is impacted.

You can use tags to group your billing data. For example, if you’re running multiple VMs for different organizations, you can use tags to group usage by cost center. Tags are included when exporting billing data or accessing it through billing APIs.

Tags can be used in automation. You can create an automation job that looks for specific tags on resources and apply the job to.

Tagging also helps you to search for resources easily.

So go ahead and use tags. In our next post, we will look at Azure Policy and how you can use that to enforce tagging.