Entity Tagging

What is Entity Tagging?

Entity tagging in Dynatrace enables you to organize your monitored environments. Tags are labels/markers that can be applied to entities, and rules applied to the tag are then applied to the entity automatically. You can use tags to find/filter/designate sets of entities, and they can be changed without changing the deployment itself. They are configurable from within the Dynatrace web UI.

Useful Links

Options

This is the easier approach which involves manually applying tags in the Dynatrace web UI. However, this means you have to manually tag each individual entity, making it impractical for larger environments.

Manual Tagging Documentation

For larger environments, it’s recommended to use automated, rule-based tagging. These tags work like manual tags but will automatically be applied to new entities that match defined rules. They cannot but removed manually from individual services, process groups, process group instances, applications or hosts. Once an entity no longer matches a defined rule, the tag is automatically removed.

Automatic Tagging Documentation

Setup and Configuration

Pre-Requisite

Automatically Applied Tags

Use the following link to send a request to Enterprise Monitoring for an automatically applied tag: ServiceNow Request Form

  • Short Description: “Request for Automatic Tag”
  • Description: please provide a name for the tag, what entities you want the tag applied to (e.g. service, host, process group, etc.) and what the trigger is for the tag (e.g. database name, host name, service port, etc.)
  • For example, you can apply the tag to databases whose name starts with a certain letter or word
    • The criteria can be begins with, does not begin with, ends with, does not end with, contains, does not contain, equals, does not equal, etc.

Configuration

Create a Tag Manually

  1. Go to Settings > Tags > Manually applied tags
  2. Type a tag in the text box
    • The tag value is where you can enter more precise information, like a property of the entity the tag is applied to
    • Ex: the tag Environment:PRD is tagging entities to the production environment, where Environment is the Key and PRD is the Value
  3. Click Add, it will appear in the list below
  4. Select the tag to apply it to entities
  5. When finished, click Done

Manual tags can also be applied within an entity’s page

  1. Click on the host, service, process, process group, synthetic monitor, etc. that you want to tag
  2. Under Properties and tags, select more… and then Add tag
  3. Follow step 2 above to type a key and value in the box

Usage

View, Edit and Delete tags

View current tags through Settings:

  1. Go to Settings > Tags > Manually applied tags or Automatically applied tags
  2. Use the filter bar to search for a tag
  3. Click on any tag in the list to view its properties
  4. Automatically applied tags can be edited/deleted, while Manually applied tags can only be deleted

View current tags through entities:

  1. Navigate to a certain entity (host, service, process, etc.)
  2. Click on the entity to get to its base page
  3. Under Properties and tags you can see all the current tags
  4. You can also search for entities with certain tags 
  5. On the navigation bar, select the type of entity (Hosts, Services, etc.)
  6. In the filter bar, select Tag to be Filtered by, and then type in the tag
  7. A list of all entities with that tag will appear