Tags for Operations and Support

Leverage operational tags to streamline day-to-day cloud management, incident response, and support processes across AWS workloads.

Problem Statement

Operations and support teams must identify, maintain, and support resources with varying operational needs, lifecycles, and criticality, often across sprawling environments.

As the resource fleet grows, manual management of bulk actions (updates, lifecycle management, incident response, patching) becomes labor-intensive Knowledge about resource assignment is captured inefficiently in external systems (like CMDBs or wikis)

Solution Overview

Operational tags enable standardized identification of resource ownership, support contacts, environment, criticality level, business impact, backup, and patching requirements. These tags drive automation for backup, compliance checks, lifecycle tracking, incident response, and change management, facilitating effective operations and troubleshooting.

Prerequisites

  • Agreed-upon set of operational and support tag keys (e.g., Owner, Contact, Environment, Criticality, Backup, PatchGroup, LifecycleStatus).
  • Permissions to add, update, and view tags on resources.
  • Operations playbooks and processes that incorporate tags.
  • TagOps setup for operational tag enforcement.

Step-by-Step Implementation

  1. Define and document required operational/support tags (with input from relevant teams).
  2. Configure TagOps rules to automatically apply operational tags to all new and existing resources. TagOps will enforce consistent tagging based on your defined rules, ensuring all resources have the required operational metadata.
  3. Incorporate tag checks into deployment, incident, and support workflows.
  4. Use tags to drive automation (e.g., auto-backup scripts, automated ticketing, resource scheduling, and support escalations).
  5. Monitor and audit tagging coverage across the environment using TagOps compliance dashboard and remediate missing or outdated tags.

Configuration Examples

Common Operational Tags:

  • Environment: "Production", "Test", "Dev"
  • Owner: "john.doe@example.com"
  • Contact: "support@yourcompany.com"
  • Criticality: "High", "Medium", "Low"
  • Backup: "Daily"
  • LifecycleStatus: "Active", "Retiring", "Archived"

Creating Resources (TagOps Will Auto-Tag):

When creating resources, TagOps will automatically apply operational tags based on your configured rules:

# Create RDS database - TagOps will automatically apply operational tags
aws rds create-db-instance \
  --db-instance-identifier mydb \
  --db-instance-class db.t3.micro \
  --engine mysql \
  --master-username admin \
  --master-user-password YourPassword123

TagOps rules will automatically apply tags like Owner, Contact, Criticality, Environment, Backup, and LifecycleStatus based on the resource type, name patterns, account, region, or other conditions you've defined in your TagOps rules.

Verification

  • Check resources in AWS Console, Tag Editor, or via TagOps for required tags.
  • Ensure incident and ticketing automations are using tags reliably.

Best Practices

  • Regularly review and update tag definitions based on operational needs.
  • Develop and document operational runbooks tied to specific tag values.
  • Leverage automation to keep tags up-to-date (e.g., for resource lifecycle changes).
  • Enable backup, patching, and monitoring automation based on tags.

Troubleshooting

  • Gaps in automation: audit operational scripts and tools for proper tag references.
  • Outdated tags: use review and reporting tools to identify stale or missing information.
  • Environmental drift: set up periodic audits and automate operational tag compliance.