Tags are an incredibly helpful way to divide your environment into meaningful segments. To create a tag, simply head to the Setup > Tags section and click the "+ Tag" button in the top right. After doing so, you should see a form that looks similar to the following:
The tag creator is broken up into 2 sections. On the top are all of the fields for defining your tag, and the bottom is where you can see what hosts are included in the tag that you create. The tagging interface provides you with powerful filters to help define the exact subset that you want to capture. The available filters are:
To start building out your tag, give the tag a name, owner, and color. From there fill out any of the filters in the "Include the Following" or "And then exclude the following" sections. The options of filters in either of these sections are the same and each can include multiple elements. Please note however that all of the inclusion filters will be applied in the query first, then from that set that is returned, the exclusion filters will be applied. In other words, any of the filters from the top section of the options will be evaluated first, before any exclusions are taken into account. Visually, this is communicated in 2 different ways. First of all, the inclusion filters are placed above the exclusion filters. Secondly, the inclusion filters appear in green, and the exclusion filters appear in red. See the following example:
As you can see, there are 2 filters added to define this tag, both of them are host pattern filters, but one is green and one is red. The green filter is first matching any hosts with the pattern *dc*
and then excluding any from that returned set that match the patterns *byod*
, *pro*
, and *sql*
. Together these inclusion and exclusion filters return 3 hosts. This example shows the same inclusion and exclusion filter being used, but that does not have to be the case.
Once tags have been created they will now show up throughout the interface on different hosts. The hosts report and host detail page will show the tag(s) that a given host are part of.
The owner of a tag also becomes incredibly important when combined with Remediation (documented here). When adding tasks to a remediation plan, the owner of a task will automatically be tied to the owner of the tag that a given host is part of. This can be overridden if needed, but it just takes one less step out of having to figure out who on your team is in charge of what section of your environment.