Tags - DevHelm

Tags are coloured labels you attach to monitors, alert channels, notification policies, and other resources. They are the workhorse primitive for filtering dashboards, routing alerts, and slicing reports without inventing rigid hierarchies.

Tags vs environments vs resource groups. Tags are attributes (e.g. team=payments). Environments are deployment stages with variable substitution. Resource groups are membership sets with composite health. Use whichever matches the question you’re answering.

Model

Property	Notes
`name`	Unique within the organization. Conventionally lowercase, hyphenated (`payments`, `customer-facing`, `tier-1`).
`color`	Optional hex code (e.g. `#10b981`). Used for visual grouping in lists and incident timelines.
`id`	Numeric identifier. Tags are referenced by name in YAML and CLI flags but by id in REST responses.

DevHelm tags are flat — there are no nested or hierarchical tags. Express hierarchy by convention (tier-1, tier-2) or by combining tags (team=payments + tier-1).

What you can tag

Resource	Tag effect
Monitors	Surface in tag-filtered dashboards; fed into notification policy match conditions.
Alert channels	Group channels for organizational filtering (no routing impact — channels route based on the policy that selects them).
Notification policies	Help organize policy rules in the dashboard list view.
Resource groups	Discoverability and reporting.

Common tagging strategies

A small, opinionated taxonomy beats a sprawling one. The strategies below tend to age well:

Dimension	Example tags	Purpose
Team / ownership	`team-payments`, `team-platform`	Who pages on incidents from this monitor
Tier / criticality	`tier-1`, `tier-2`, `tier-3`	Drives escalation severity and notification routing
Customer surface	`customer-facing`, `internal`	Status-page inclusion, SLO scope
Layer	`frontend`, `api`, `database`, `infra`	Postmortem grouping, ownership rotation
Compliance	`pci`, `soc2`, `gdpr`	Scoped audit reports

Resist the urge to tag for every possible filter; you can always add a tag later, but you cannot easily reclaim a 50-tag soup.

Routing alerts by tag

Tags become powerful when paired with notification policies. A policy can match on any combination of tags and direct matching incidents to specific channels and escalation chains:

notification-policies:
  - name: Payments tier-1 → PagerDuty
    match:
      tags: [team-payments, tier-1]
    channels: [pagerduty-payments]
    escalation: tier-1-rotation

Walkthrough: Alert routing by tag guide.

Managing tags

Dashboard
CLI
YAML
Terraform

Open Settings → Tags.
Click Create Tag, choose a name and (optionally) a color.
Apply tags from the monitor / channel / policy detail pages, or in bulk from list views.

devhelm tags list
devhelm tags create --name payments --color "#10b981"
devhelm tags update 42 --color "#f59e0b"
devhelm tags delete 42

Full reference: devhelm tags.

tags:
  - name: payments
    color: "#10b981"
  - name: tier-1
    color: "#ef4444"

monitors:
  - name: Stripe Charge API
    type: HTTP
    tags: [payments, tier-1]
    config:
      url: https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges

Reference tags by name in any resource that supports a tags: array.

resource "devhelm_tag" "payments" {
  name  = "payments"
  color = "#10b981"
}

resource "devhelm_monitor" "stripe" {
  name              = "Stripe Charge API"
  type              = "HTTP"
  frequency_seconds = 60
  tag_ids           = [devhelm_tag.payments.id]
  config            = jsonencode({ url = "https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges" })
}

Lifecycle and constraints

Renaming a tag updates references everywhere automatically — IDs stay stable.
Deleting a tag removes it from every resource it’s attached to. Notification policy match conditions referencing the deleted tag are flagged as broken in the dashboard until edited.
Tag names are unique within the workspace. Two tags with the same name cannot coexist.
Tags are workspace-scoped. They do not leak across workspaces.

Reporting and exports

Filter list views by tag combinations on monitors, incidents, alert channels, and notification policies.
Audit log search can filter by subject.tags for tag-scoped activity reviews.
REST API supports ?tagId=42 query params on most list endpoints — useful for building custom dashboards or feeding tag-filtered data into BI tools.

Next steps

Alert routing by tag

Build tag-driven notification policies.

Notification policies

Match on tags to route alerts.

Resource groups

Compare composite health vs flat tagging.

tags CLI

Manage from the command line.

Documentation Index

​Model

​What you can tag

​Common tagging strategies

​Routing alerts by tag

​Managing tags

​Lifecycle and constraints

​Reporting and exports

​Next steps

Alert routing by tag

Notification policies

Resource groups

tags CLI

Model

What you can tag

Common tagging strategies

Routing alerts by tag

Managing tags

Lifecycle and constraints

Reporting and exports

Next steps