Tag Smarter, Not Harder: The Tagging Mistakes You’re Still Making (Part 2)
Before We Dive In... Did You Read Part 1?
If you skipped Part 1, go check that out first.
In Part 1, we covered why tagging matters, how to structure your tags using layers, and why Unified Service Tagging is non-negotiable if you want Datadog to actually work.
Messy tagging doesn’t just annoy engineers—it slows down troubleshooting, clutters dashboards, and makes alerting unreliable. In Part 2, we’re covering how to keep your tagging strategy clean, scalable, and actually useful over time.
Tags Are the Backbone of Datadog—Not an Afterthought
No tags = no observability. If your Datadog environment is a tagging free-for-all, you’re making things harder than they need to be.
Without structured, consistent tags, you’re going to run into issues like:
Dashboards that don’t tell you anything useful
Alerts that miss the right people (or flood everyone)
Troubleshooting that takes twice as long as it should
Good tagging doesn’t need to be perfect—but it does need to be deliberate and consistent.
Start with Datadog’s Unified Service Tagging
Datadog built the platform around Unified Service Tagging for a reason—these three tags are what make logs, metrics, and traces actually correlate across your environment. Skipping them makes troubleshooting harder than it needs to be.
Make sure every relevant resource has:
env (e.g., prod, staging)
service (e.g., billing-api, frontend)
version (e.g., 1.3.4)*
*Note: version should only be applied to applications, not infrastructure components like hosts, databases, or load balancers.
Don’t Overthink Tags—Datadog Already Does the Heavy Lifting
Good news: Datadog integrations already generate a ton of useful tags for you. You don’t need to manually tag every little thing.
Here’s a small sample of what’s already built in:
AWS EC2 instance
autoscaling_group, availability-zone, image, instance-id, instance-type, kernel, name,security_group_name
AWS RDS
auto_minor_version_upgrade, dbinstanceclass, dbclusteridentifier, dbinstanceidentifier, dbname, engine, engineversion, hostname, name, publicly_accessible, secondary_availability-zone
AWS ECS
clustername, servicename, instance_id
Kubernetes
kube_service, kube_daemon_set, kube_container_name, kube_namespace, kube_deployment, kube_stateful_set, kube_cronjob, image_name, short_image, image_tag
If a single machine runs multiple applications (foo, bar, and baz), it should have separate tags: application:foo, application:bar, and application:baz. This ensures you can filter logs, dashboards, and alerts by each application without confusion.
Think in Levels (or Deal with a Mess Later)
This type of strategy allows for queries like the following image, where (as an example) we can create an alert that splits by who owns the service, which host it’s running on, and which service is running, allowing us to send a dynamic alert.
How to Keep Your Tags Useful (And Avoid a Mess)
Even with the best intentions, tagging can get out of control fast. The key to keeping it useful is setting guardrails before it turns into a problem.
1. Enforce Tag Policies on Monitors, SLOs, and Synthetics
Datadog Tag Policies help ensure monitors, SLOs, and synthetics include required tags, keeping things consistent where it matters most. Note that Tag Policies don’t apply to everything—only to monitors, SLOs, and synthetics. To enforce tagging across all resources, use IaC (like Terraform) and cloud provider policies.
2. Automate Tagging in Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and Cloud Policies
If you’re still manually applying tags, stop. It’s inefficient, error-prone, and won’t scale. Instead, enforce tagging at deployment using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or Kubernetes manifests.
Define your tagging policies at the cloud provider level and Datadog will automatically pull these tags through cloud integrations—so enforcing them upstream ensures consistency across all Datadog resources.
Example:
resource "aws_instance" "example" {
tags = {
Name = "web-server"
Env = "prod"
Team = "backend"
}
}
3. Clean Up Old Tags (Or Drown in Tech Debt)
Tagging standards evolve. If you’re not actively cleaning up old or inconsistent tags, you’re building up future pain. Fix it now.
How to Make Monitors Actually Useful with Tags
Tags don’t just organize data—they make monitors more dynamic and scalable.
Use Tags for Dynamic Alert Contacts
Instead of manually assigning alert contacts, let Datadog do the work. In the above example, the query is split by owner, service, and host. If the owner is john_doe, and we know their email is john_doe@company.com, a monitor template such as @{{owner.name}}@company.com will send an email to that address. If another alert triggers and the owner this time is bob_jones, that template will trigger an email to bob_jones@company.com. See here for more information.
Common Tagging Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)
Even experienced teams struggle with tagging. Here are some common pitfalls and how to avoid them:
Tagging Everything "Just in Case"
Too many tags = cluttered dashboards and noisy alerts. Tag only what you need.Using Inconsistent Tag Names
owner=alice vs. team=alice vs. service_owner=alice? Pick one standard and stick to it.Ignoring Unified Service Tagging
Skipping env, service, and version makes it harder to correlate logs, metrics, and traces.Using High-Cardinality Tags
Tagging constantly changing values (timestamps, request IDs) makes data hardener to visualize and analyze. And, it can seriously impact your custom metric bill.
Bottom line–keep it simple, keep it consistent, keep it automated. Additional documentation provided by Datadog can be found at the following links:
Struggling to untangle your Datadog tags?
We’ve helped teams clean up the mess, get their dashboards under control, and make alerts actually useful. NoBS specializes in practical, real-world Datadog setups—not just theory. Let’s fix this. Get in touch.
