Azure Hack – Prefixing tags to hide them in the portal

Navigating the wonderful world of Azure can sometimes be a blur, and using tags to organize your resources and cloud environment can help a great deal. When using tags, you often want them to be visible for everyone to see, but what happens when you don’t? Up until recently, we didn’t think you had a choice. Thankfully and luckily, it turns out that there is a way to hide your tags, and here’s how.

• Locate or create the tag that you would like to hide.
• Prefix the tag with ‘hidden-‘
• Marvel at your own mind-blowing skills.

That’s all it takes. Prefixing the tag with ‘hidden-’ will ensure that the tag remains in place and is functional, but not visible. This solution works for Subscriptions, Resource Groups, and Resources. You can set it from the Portal, cli, or anything else.

Use cases

While you often want tags to be visible, there are multiple scenarios in which you may prefer to hide them. Perhaps it’s a scenario where you don’t want the end-user to have to worry about it, or you wish you hide the cost center or information class. It can also be a useful solution for tags that are exclusively used by the system and serve no real function for the user.  

Here’s a real-world example of our own: a client asked us to tag the specific cloud environment that a certain resource could be found in, and to include the region. This information is relatively obvious to staff and team members but may be needed when you pull metadata and input it into a different system – for example, when summarizing the resources in a particular region using Azure, AWS, and GCP.  

Up until recently, no one seemed to know that this function even existed, and when we search through forums and industry-related channels, we still can’t find any information on this helpful hack. It’s surprising, to see how the function has been discussed and demanded by peers across the globe for years. Turns out, it’s already here. So, make sure you spread the wonderful news.