Azure resources with no associated tags

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Using tags on resources allows an IT department to better organize cloud-based resources. Tags facilitate the identification of assets running specific work loads, department ownership, business process priority, and cost related information. Finding a large inventory of untagged assets is an important input for monitoring and managing tagging policy in the use of cloud based resources. You want to create a search to help your IT department do this.

Data required

Microsoft Azure resource data

Procedure

Configure the Splunk Add-on for Microsoft Cloud Services.
Run the following search. You can optimize it by specifying an index and adjusting the time range.

sourcetype=mscs:resource:* 
|search _raw!=*tags* 
|dedup id, name, location 
|table id, name, location tags.* 
|fillnull value="Untagged!"

Search explanation

The table provides an explanation of what each part of this search achieves. You can adjust this query based on the specifics of your environment.

Splunk Search	Explanation
sourcetype=mscs:resource:*	Search only Azure resource data.
\|search _raw!=tags	Filter the results to only include those where the _raw field does not include “tags”.
\|dedup id, name, location	Remove duplicate results by ID, name, and location.
\|table id, name, location tags.*	Display the results in a table with columns in the order shown.
\|fillnull value="Untagged!"	Fill any null values with “Untagged!”

Next steps

Sample results for this search are shown in the table below. This search can serve as input to a potential automation process to assign tags or request owners to formulate and assign tags to their assets. Splunk SOAR could be used for such an automation project by putting the results of the search into a playbook that formats an email to the owner of the untagged asset requiring tagging to be put into place. Azure’s Cloud Adoption Framework contains a decision guide for resource naming and the use of tags.

id	name	location	tags.Owner	tags.Purpose	tags.service
/subscriptions/1213b189-13ff-42fe-b370-df6da421bce1/resourceGroups/frothly/providers/Microsoft.Network/publicIPAddresses/test-ip	test-ip	southcentralus	Untagged!	Untagged!	Untagged!
/subscriptions/1213b189-13ff-42fe-b370-df6da421bce1/resourceGroups/MineMeld/providers/Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces/networkInterface1	networkInterface1	southcentralus	Untagged!	Untagged!	Untagged!
/subscriptions/1213b189-13ff-42fe-b370-df6da421bce1/resourceGroups/bots/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/Splunk	Splunk	australiasoutheast	Untagged!	Untagged!	Untagged!
/subscriptions/1213b189-13ff-42fe-b370-df6da421bce1/resourceGroups/bots/providers/Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks/bots-vnet	bots-vnet	australiasoutheast	Untagged!	Untagged!	Untagged!
/subscriptions/1213b189-13ff-42fe-b370-df6da421bce1/resourceGroups/bots/providers/Microsoft.Network/networkInterfaces/splunk64	splunk64	australiasoutheast	Untagged!	Untagged!	Untagged!

You might also be interested in other processes associated with the Managing Azure cloud infrastructure use case.