Tagging Systems Manager resources

A tag is a label that you assign to an Amazon resource. Each tag consists of a key and a value, both of which you define.

Tags allow you to categorize your Amazon resources in different ways, such as by purpose, owner, or environment. For example, if you want to organize and manage your resources according to whether they're used for development or production, you might tag some of them with the key Environment and the value Production. You can then perform various types of queries for resources tagged "Key=Environment,Values=Production". For example, you could define a set of tags for your account's managed nodes that help you track or target nodes by operating system and environment, such as your SUSE Linux Enterprise Server grouped as development, staging, and production. You can also perform operations on resources by specifying this key-value pair in your commands, such as running an update script on all nodes in the group or reviewing the status of those nodes.

You can use the tags applied to your Amazon Systems Manager resources in various operations. For example, you can target only managed nodes that are tagged with a specified tag key-value pair when you run a command or assign targets to a maintenance window. You can also restrict access to your resources based on the tags applied to them.

Going further, you can create resource groups by specifying the same tags for Amazon resources of various types, not only the same type. After that, you can use Resource Groups to view information about which resources in a group are compliant and working correctly and which resources require action. The information you view pertains to all types of Amazon resources that can be added to a resource group, not only supported Systems Manager resource types. For more information, see What are Amazon Resource Groups? in the Amazon Resource Groups User Guide.

The remainder of this chapter describes how to add and remove tags from Systems Manager resources.