Add and use tags

Application tags

Application tags apply to ARMS applications. You can view or modify application tags on the Application Monitoring > Application List page in the ARMS console. You can use application tags for purposes such as filtering applications, managing permissions, and allocating costs.

Instance tags

Each application instance represents an application process that connects to ARMS with the same application name. Unlike application tags, instance tags apply to individual application instances, allowing different instances of the same application to have different tags.

For application instances automatically discovered in a Kubernetes environment, ARMS adds the following default instance tags:

In addition to the default tags, you can add custom instance tags. Application instances also inherit all tags from their parent application. The monitoring data that ARMS generates for an application instance includes all of its assigned application and instance tags.

Example:

As shown in the following figure, the application my-app has two instances. The metric data generated by ARMS for Instance B includes the following tags: {env: Dev, team: Observability, app: my-app, workloadKind: Deployment, workloadName: my-app, clusterName: ClusterA, namespace: nsA, gitVersion: 1.0.1}.

Add custom instance tags in Kubernetes

'f:readyReplicas': {}
        'f:replicas': {}
        'f:updatedReplicas': {}
    manager: kube-controller-manager
    operation: Update
    subresource: status
    time: '2023-11-16T09:39:32Z'
  name: mall-gateway
  namespace: arms-apm-demo
  resourceVersion: '943537'
  uid: xxxd0b1bf76f42
spec:
  progressDeadlineSeconds: 600
  replicas: 1
  revisionHistoryLimit: 10
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: mall-gateway
  strategy:
    rollingUpdate:
      maxSurge: 25%
      maxUnavailable: 25%
    type: RollingUpdate
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        gitVersion: '1.0.2'  # Add a custom instance tag
        app: mall-gateway
        armsPilotAutoEnable: 'on'
        armsPilotCreateAppName: mall-gateway
    spec:
      containers:
      - env:
        - name: SERVICE_NAME

Add tags for manually installed agents

#export ARMS_HOST_TAGS=key1:value1&key2:value2
export ARMS_HOST_TAGS="gitVersion:1.0.2&ip:192.168.1.101"

#export ARMS_HOST_TAGS=key1:value1&key2:value2
export ARMS_HOST_TAGS="gitVersion:1.0.2&ip:192.168.1.101"

Method 1:

If a pod label has the app.customAppKey. prefix, ARMS identifies it as an application tag, not an instance tag.

For example, in the following code, ARMS adds the application tag env: dev to the application associated with this workload.

  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app.customAppKey.env: dev
        app: mall-gateway
        armsPilotAutoEnable: 'on'
        aliyun.com/app-language: golang  # Required for Go applications to identify the application language. Not required for Java applications.
        armsPilotCreateAppName: mall-gateway

Method 2:

To reuse existing pod labels as application tags, configure the ack-onepilot component.

Filter applications

On the ARMS Application List page and when creating alert rules, you can use application tags to quickly filter applications.

Tag-based access control

You can manage Resource Access Management (RAM) permissions based on application tags. For more information, see Custom RAM policies for Application Monitoring.

Filter data by instance tag

1. Log on to the ARMS console. In the navigation pane on the left, choose Application Monitoring > Application List.

2. On the Application List page, select a region at the top and then click the name of your target application.

   Note

   The icons in the Language column indicate the programming language of the application:

   : A Java application connected to Application Monitoring.

   : A Go application connected to Application Monitoring.

   : A Python application connected to Application Monitoring.

   -: An application connected to Managed Service for OpenTelemetry.

3. On the application details pages, you can filter monitoring data by instance tags. For example, you can compare and analyze data based on image version numbers.

Query metrics by tag in Grafana

1. Log on to the ARMS console. In the navigation pane on the left, choose Application Monitoring > Application List.

2. On the Application List page, select a region at the top and then click the name of your target application.

   Note

   The icons in the Language column indicate the programming language of the application:

   : A Java application connected to Application Monitoring.

   : A Go application connected to Application Monitoring.

   : A Python application connected to Application Monitoring.

   -: An application connected to Managed Service for OpenTelemetry.

3. In the navigation pane on the left, click Grafana View. At the top of the page, select different tags to filter the metrics.