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Develop your naming and tagging strategy for Azure resources

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Organize your cloud assets to support governance, operational management, and accounting requirements. Well-defined naming and metadata tagging conventions help to quickly locate and manage resources. These conventions also help associate cloud usage costs with business teams via chargeback and showback accounting mechanisms.

Define your naming and tagging strategy as early as possible. Use the following links to help you define and implement your strategy:

Note

Every business has its own organizational and management requirements. These recommendations help start a discussion with your cloud adoption teams. As the discussion proceeds, use the tools below to document the naming and tagging decisions you make when aligning these recommendations to your specific business needs.

Download the Azure Naming Tool to create an organizational naming reference and name generator.

Download the naming and tagging conventions tracking template.

Purpose of naming and tagging

Accurately representing and naming your resources is essential for security purposes. If you come upon a security incident, it's critical to quickly identify affected systems, what functions those systems support, and the potential business impact. Security services such as Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel reference resources and their associated logging and alert information by resource name.

Azure defines naming rules and restrictions for Azure resources. This guidance provides you with detailed recommendations to support enterprise cloud adoption efforts.

Changing resource names can be difficult. Establish a comprehensive naming convention before you begin any large cloud deployment.

Naming and tagging strategy

A naming and tagging strategy includes business and operational details as components of resource names and metadata tags:

  • The business side of this strategy ensures that resource names and tags include the organizational information you need to identify the teams. Use a resource along with the business owners who are responsible for resource costs.

  • The operational side ensures that names and tags include necessary information. IT teams use this information to identify the workload, application, environment, criticality, and other information useful for managing resources.

Next steps

Learn about the considerations for defining your naming convention of your Azure resources and assets, and review example names for resources and assets in Azure.

Name your Azure resources and assets