Enhanced Atlas Functionality: Introducing Resource Tagging for Projects

Tonya Edmonds and Sabina Friden
February 15, 2024 | Updated: February 29, 2024
#Atlas

We are thrilled to announce that Atlas has now extended its tagging functionality to include projects in addition to deployments. This enhancement enables users to apply resource tags to projects, further enriching the way you can associate metadata with your cloud resources. With this new capability, categorizing, organizing, and tracking your projects within Atlas becomes more intuitive and effective, offering a streamlined approach to managing your resources.

Enhancing project management with resource tagging

Incorporating resource tagging into projects significantly enhances visibility and streamlines project management. By applying tags, teams can categorize resources, making it easier to understand the purpose or specific metadata associated with a project. This practice is especially beneficial in large-scale projects, where organizing resources systematically can vastly improve productivity. Tags serve as versatile markers, representing various attributes of a project such as environment, criticality, cost center, or application, thereby simplifying project organization.

Furthermore, tags lay the groundwork for supporting automation and policy enforcement within organizations. By utilizing tags, tasks related to access controls, compliance, and other policies can be automated, enhancing operational efficiency. Auditing processes also benefit from tagging, facilitating tracking, and ensuring resources meet specific business requirements.

In environments where teamwork is essential, adding tags to projects aids in streamlined collaboration. Tags allow team members to quickly grasp the purpose or function of different resources, surfacing critical information about the project that can help reduce miscommunication and conflicts. Overall, adopting resource tagging in cloud resource management unlocks significant improvements in performance and efficiency, making it an invaluable tool for modern organizational needs.

How to add tags to projects

You can view and manage tagging on projects in multiple areas:

Atlas UI: When creating a new project, on the Organization Project List, or within Project Settings.
Admin API: Various operations on projects were enhanced to allow you to view, create, and manage tags applied to projects, such as CreateOneProject and ReturnAllProjects.
Atlas CLI: various commands on projects were enhanced to all you to view, create, and manage tags applied to projects.

Resource tagging best practices

We recognize that the complexity of tagging use cases varies, tailored to an organization's unique structure and specific business requirements. With this in mind, we’ve designed resource tagging in Atlas to support a variety of use cases. We suggest defining tags that should be applied across all projects to get started. This will ensure your tagging approach is reliable and consistent across all resources. If you have multiple deployments within a project, apply more granular metadata on each deployment.

In the simplified example below, an organization has three projects containing one or more deployments. Each project contains a deployment for each development environment. We’ve added common tags to the projects and more granular tags to identify the environment at the deployment level.

Given the uniqueness of each organization, we've designed a flexible system with simplicity at its heart, using key-value pairs. If you have a flatter organization structure in Atlas (e.g. with one deployment per project), consider adding all tags at the level that makes the most sense for your organization. This may vary depending on how you manage your deployments, existing tag workflows, or where you desire to view tags in the Atlas UI. Finally, here are a few points to consider when tagging:

Do not include any sensitive information such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Protected Health Information (PHI) in your resource tag keys or values.
Use a standard naming convention for all tags, including spelling, case, and punctuation.
Define and communicate a strategy for enforcing mandatory tags. We recommend starting by identifying the environment and the application, service, or workload.
Use namespaces or prefixes to easily identify tags owned by different business units.
Use programmatic tools like Terraform or the Admin API to manage the database of your tags.

In summary

The introduction of resource tagging for projects marks an improvement in how users can intuitively categorize, organize, and track projects within Atlas, streamlining cloud resource management.

We're eager to hear your thoughts and ideas on further applications of resource tagging in Atlas. Please share your feedback and suggestions at feedback.mongodb.com, as your input is invaluable in shaping the future of our platform.

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