Using Hidden Azure Tags

Tags are essential for Azure reporting, governance or automation. Tags can be used to quickly look up things like environment type, owners, support hours, departments, and other valuable information about Azure resources. Having said that, tags can cause quite a bit of clutter on Azure Portal, especially considering that not all tags are user-friendly and we can add up to 50 tags to a resource. This is where a little undocumented feature of Azure like hidden tags come in. Hidden tags are that would not be displayed Azure Portal tags, but still can be used for reporting, governance or automation.

For example, here is a typical Azure resource with a convoluted name and a bunch of tags.

If we add more tags that our automation or reporting might require, this screen can get pretty busy fast. Let’s see how we can use hidden tags to add more required tags without cluttering resource page. To create hidden tags just add ‘hidden-’ prefix to a tag name.

We have added a bunch of hidden tags, which are important to business, but those tags do not show up in Azure Portal. Also, notice that our resource name has a more user friendly title next to it, which comes from ‘hidden-title’ tag. Neat, right?

All of resource tags are still there and can be viewed by clicking JSON View in Azure Portal or using PowerShell or Azure CLI.

Hidden tags can be easily managed using PowerShell, Azure CLI, Bicep, Terraform, or even Azure Portal. Now you can have all kinds of meaningful metadata to report on and or automate with, and no one has to see it.

Hope this was helpful.

#DevOpsGuy