How to Configure Smart Tags Policies in ZopNight

Smart tags are virtual tags. A tagging policy enforces one tag key and derives the value from the resource’s own fields: provider, region, type, instance_type or name. Nothing reaches your cloud account until you accept a tag and choose to apply it. This page replaces older guidance about an automatic environment and “noStop” predictor; that heuristic tagger has been retired.

Before you start

• A connected cloud account. Deriving and accepting smart tags happens inside ZopNight; writing tags back to the cloud is a remediation, so that step needs a read + write account.
• Decide the key and the rule table. For example, an Application key whose value depends on what the resource name contains.

1. Create the policy

1. Go to Settings › Policy › Tagging.
2. Create a policy for your key, for example cost-allocation, and choose which resource field drives the value.
3. For a lookup table, create several policies that share the same key, each with its own condition (for example name contains checkout gives Application = checkout). A spreadsheet of such rules can be imported, with sheet row order becoming each policy’s priority.

When more than one policy matches a resource, the winner is decided by scope first, then priority (a lower number wins), then the older policy.

2. Review what was derived

Open the Smart Tags page. Derived tags start as Pending; accepted ones sit on the Accepted tab, each with org-wide counts, and you can filter by provider (AWS, GCP, Azure). If the derived value already equals the live cloud tag on that resource, it is accepted automatically, so resources you had already tagged correctly are not left pending.

3. Accept or revoke

Accept per key. Accepted tags count toward cost attribution inside ZopNight straight away. Revoking returns a tag to pending; there is no reject state, because a pending tag is simply derived and not yet accepted. Tags are reconciled on every refresh: an accepted tag stays only while the policy still derives the same value.

4. Apply to cloud, if you want the tag outside ZopNight

Apply to cloud writes accepted tags to the provider as a remediation job, and skips any tag that already matches the live value. The native equivalent, if you prefer to write tags yourself, is one command per cloud:

# AWS: up to 20 ARNs per call; needs tag:TagResources plus the service's own tagging permission
aws resourcegroupstaggingapi tag-resources \
  --resource-arn-list arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:111122223333:instance/i-0abc123 \
  --tags Application=checkout

# Google Cloud: label keys and values must be lowercase
gcloud compute instances add-labels checkout-web-1 --zone=us-central1-a --labels=application=checkout

# Azure: Merge keeps existing tags; requires Tag Contributor or write access to the resource
az tag update --resource-id /subscriptions/SUB/resourceGroups/rg/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/checkout-web-1 \
  --operation Merge --tags Application=checkout

Check the result in the provider console or with aws resourcegroupstaggingapi get-resources --tag-filters Key=Application, then confirm the Smart Tags page shows the tag as accepted with a cloud value.

Where the tags show up

Accepted smart tags appear beside native tags on the Reports page Tags tab, marked with their source, and feed the dashboard’s Tag Coverage widget. For how that attribution is calculated, see tags in cost data; for naming conventions worth enforcing, see cloud tagging best practices.