Add tags to a service in ITSI

Add key-value tags to a service or service sandbox in IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) to provide context when filtering services. You can leverage the search bar in the Service Analyzer to filter to a specific subset of services based on the tags those services contain, in addition to the service name and KPI name. Tags are stored in the itsi_tags KV store collection.

Service tags can serve a variety of functions, including the following examples:

  • They eliminate the need to append prefixes to your service titles because you can perform the same filtering actions directly through tagging.
  • Tags provide a second layer of filtering in the Service Analyzer beyond services and KPIs. For example, after filtering to your Web Store services, you could include an additional filter for the tag AMEA to only view web store services in that specific region.

  • Service tags enrich KPI alerts and facilitate troubleshooting. Service tags are included as part of the alert payload in the itsi.tag.<key> fields (for example, itsi.tag.environment = "prod").

Consider the following rules for adding tags:

  • You can't add duplicate tags to a service.
  • Tags are case insensitive, meaning you can't add duplicate tags with different cases.
  • Tags must be strings and can't contain the following characters: \ / | = " ' • * ! @ ? … , ; $ ^ . :

ITSI includes the following suggested key values you can use to populate service tags:

  • environment

  • criticality

  • ci-id

  • cmdb-class

  • owner

  • support-group

  • status

  • region

  • tier

  • application

  • monitored-by

  • team

  • component

  • deployment-model

  • compliance

Prerequisites

You must have write access to a service to add tags to it. For more information, see ITSI capabilities reference in the Administration Manual.

Steps

Follow these steps to add tags to a service:

  1. From the ITSI main menu, select Configuration then Service Monitoring then Service and KPI Management.
  2. Select the service you want to add tags to, or select multiple services, then Bulk action then Edit Service Tags. Alternatively, you can also add tags when you create a new service.
  3. Go to the Settings tab.
  4. Under Tags, add one or more key-value tags to the service. Define the value of each key for accurate tagging, for example, environment = prod. You can add up to 20 keys per service, and each key can have up to 10 values. Keys and values can each be up to 256 characters.

  5. Select Save.

Note: Tags with a chain icon indicate they are from a service template.

After tagging the services in your environment, go to the Service Analyzer and use the Filter by Tags option to filter different tags and view the corresponding services and their KPIs. For more information, see Overview of the Service Analyzer in ITSI.

Migrate existing service tags

All existing tags are automatically migrated with a reserved tag key called legacylabels. For example, if a service had the tag prod and EMEA, it will have the tags legacylabels = prod and legacylabels = EMEA after tags are migrated. You can filter for these old tags on the Service Analyzer.

Colons in existing tags will be replaced with hyphens. For example, env:prod becomes env-prod. Labels containing / \ | = " ' * ! @ ? . , ; $ ^ cannot be migrated.

Service template tags

When you add tags to a service template, those tags are appended to the existing tags in all linked services when the next template sync happens. Template tags have a chain symbol to indicate they were populated from a service template.

If you add or remove tags from a template, they're also added or removed from the linked services. Tags act as soft links between services and templates, so removing or adding a tag to a linked service doesn't unlink it from its template. For a list of actions that unlink a service from a template, see Link and unlink a service from a service template in ITSI.

When you create a new service template from an existing service, all tags currently on the parent service, including tags it inherited from another template, are copied to the new template. For more information, see Create a service template in ITSI.

When you save a service template, use the Service Template Tag Sync option to determine how the tags are applied to linked services. Select one of the following:

  • Apply All Template Tags (default): Adds or restores all tags on the linked services. Tags added manually are also retained.

  • Update Linked Tags Only: Updates the existing tags only, and adds new tags from the template. Tags that were updated or removed from individual services are retained.

  • Stop syncing template tags: Service template tags aren't synced to the linked services. Existing tags won't update, and future updates aren't applied.