Help Center/ Elastic Cloud Server/ User Guide/ Resources and Tags/ Tag Management/ Overview
Updated on 2026-08-10 GMT+08:00
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Overview

What Is a Tag?

A tag identifies an ECS. You can add tags to ECSs to help identify and manage them easily.

You can add tags to an ECS in the following scenarios:
  • When creating an ECS, you can add tags under Instance Management > Tag.

    Tags added during the ECS creation will also be added to the EIP and EVS disks (including the system and data disks) created along with the ECS. If the ECS uses an existing EIP, the tags will not be added to that EIP.

  • After an ECS is created, you can add tags to the ECS in either of the following ways:
    • In the Tag column of the ECS list, click Edit Tag and add tags to the ECS.
    • On the Tags tab of the ECS details page, click Add Tag to add tags to the ECS.

    When adding tags to an existing ECS, if you select the associated EIP and EVS disks, the tags will also be added to the EIP and EVS disks (including the system and data disks) that were created along with the ECS.

After the tags are added, you can view them on the ECS, EIP, and EVS disk details pages.

If your organization has created tag policies for the ECS, you need to add tags based on the tag policies. If any tag does not comply with the tag policies, the ECS creation may fail. Contact the organization administrator to learn more about the tag policies.

Tag Application Scenarios

Tags are used to identify cloud resources. When you have many cloud resources of the same type, you can use tags to classify cloud resources by dimension (for example, usage, owner, or environment) to make resource search and batch operations easier.

With tags, you can:

Figure 1 shows how to group and manage resources by tag. In this example, each cloud resource is assigned two tags: owner and usage. You can quickly search for and filter specific cloud resources by tag.

For example, you can quickly filter out the cloud resources owned by team A by the owner tag, and then manage these resources.

Figure 1 Tag example

Tag Setting Rules

  • A maximum of 20 tags can be added to each ECS.
  • Each tag consists of a key-value pair.
  • For each resource, a tag key must be unique and can have only one tag value.
  • A tag consists of a tag key and a tag value. Table 1 lists the tag key and value requirements.
    Table 1 Tag key and value requirements

    Parameter

    Requirement

    Example Value

    Key
    • Cannot be left blank.
    • The key value must be unique for an ECS.
    • Can contain a maximum of 128 characters.
    • Cannot contain the following special characters: =*<>\,|/
    • Cannot be started or ended with a space.

    Organization

    Value
    • Can contain a maximum of 255 characters.
    • Cannot contain the following special characters: =*<>\,|
    • Cannot be started or ended with a space.

    Apache
Parent Topic: Tag Management