14 May Utilization of Tags in Azure Resource Management

Managing your Azure environment properly requires that you organize your resources first and foremost. Tags are name-value pairs that may be assigned to resources, and Azure offers a means through which these tags can be used to properly arrange and classify a resource’s contents. Tags may be quite beneficial when it comes to controlling expenses, ensuring compliance, and even streamlining operational chores and responsibilities. Through the use of the Azure portal, the Azure Command Line Interface (CLI), and PowerShell, we are going to investigate the process of working with tags that are associated with Azure resources.

What exactly are these Azure Tags?

Azure tags are a kind of information that you may add to the resources in your Azure account. They make it possible for you to classify resources according to the requirements of your business. You have the option of generating tags in order to classify resources according to departments, projects, environments (such as development, testing, and production), or any other criterion that corresponds to the requirements of your company.

A tag always has a name and an associated value. You may, for instance, create a tag with the name “Environment” and give it the value “Production.” Each resource may have many tags applied to it, but no two resources can have the same tag name. You can apply multiple tags to each resource.

The use of Azure tags is a valuable tool for managing and organizing the resources you have in Azure. Azure gives you a variety of options to apply, update, and filter resources based on tags, regardless of whether you want to utilize the Azure interface, the Azure Command Line Interface (CLI), or PowerShell. You may increase compliance, boost cost control, and simplify operational duties in your Azure environment if you use tags correctly. Keep in mind that a cloud that is well-organized is a happy cloud.

Rock it with PowerShell!

Here is how you can assign a tag to a resource using PowerShell:

Set-AzResource -ResourceId "/subscriptions/<SubscriptionId>/resourceGroups/MyResourceGroup/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/VM" -Tag @{ Department="Logistics" } -Force

To get all resources with a specific tag, use this command:

Get-AzResource -TagName "Department" -TagValue "Logistics"

To add multiple tags at once, you can extend the hashtable in the -Tag parameter. This command will add three tags (Department, Project, and Environment) to the specified VM.

Set-AzResource -ResourceId "/subscriptions/<SubscriptionId>/resourceGroups/MyResourceGroup/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/VM" -Tag @{ Department="Logistics"; Project="XYZ"; Environment="Production" } -Force

You may change a tag by first fetching its current tags, then updating those tags, and then reapplying those tags. Because the Set-AzResource command replaces all existing tags with the ones you provide, this step is essential.

$resource = Get-AzResource -ResourceId "/subscriptions/<SubscriptionId>/resourceGroups/MyResourceGroup/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/VM"
$tags = $resource.Tags
$tags["Department"] = "Logistics"
Set-AzResource -Tag $tags -ResourceId $resource.ResourceId -Force

To remove a tag, you can fetch the existing tags, remove the unwanted tag, and then reapply the tags:

$resource = Get-AzResource -ResourceId "/subscriptions/<SubscriptionId>/resourceGroups/MyResourceGroup/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/VM"
$tags = $resource.Tags
$tags.Remove("Department")
Set-AzResource -Tag $tags -ResourceId $resource.ResourceId -Force

You may use the Get-AzResource command with multiple -TagName and -TagValue options to filter resources based on more than one tag at the same time:

Get-AzResource -TagName "Department","Project" -TagValue "Logistics","XYZ"