When working with cloud environments, identification of deployed resources is important to be able understand the need of the resources (environment, owner, application…).
These is achieved by using tags.
While you can enforce the use of tags in Azure using an Azure policy, it requires some administration tasks and does not automatically inherit from the subscription or resource group where the resources are deployed.
This also have a big limitation as if there is a change in tags requirements (new tag for example), this change does not automatically apply to existing resources; you have to edit each individual existing resource to apply the change.
Good news, you can now enable tags inheritance using the cost management.
NOTE this is available only for customers with Enterprise Agreement (EA) or Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA)
To be able to enable and manage tags inheritance, you need to have the following permissions:
- For subscriptions:
- Cost Management reader to view
- Cost Management Contributor to edit
- For EA billing accounts:
- Enterprise Administrator (read-only) to view
- Enterprise Administrator to edit
- For MCA billing profiles:
- Billing profile reader to view
- Billing profile contributor to edit
To enable the tag inheritance, connect to your Azure portal (https://portal.azure.com/) and access the Cost Management\Manage billing account or Cost Management\Manage subscription blade where you will be able to enable the tag inheritance
When enabling the tags inheritance and if a tag with the same name exist, you will be able to either keep the existing resource tag or overwrite with the tag from the subscription or resource group
Off course as you want to inherit from the subscription and resource group, you have to choose the overwrite option
After activation it may take up to 24 hours to start the inheritance.
Once the tags have been successfully applied, you will be able to view the cost of your resources based on tags by accessing the Cost Management\Cost Analysis blade and filter with the ‘organizational’ tag.