Feature Focus: How to use Application Tags?

2 June 2021

Other features (application links, custom indicators, etc.)

This article explains how to create and manage application tags to filter, segment and organize your application portfolio in CAST Highlight.

How to create and manage tags?

A tag in CAST Highlight is a custom characteristic or an attribute that you can attach to one or multiple applications. Tags are not hierarchical but an application can have multiple tags. This makes them a very powerful complement to domains and other filters (technologies, survey questions, etc.) as they provide an extra layer of flexibility to organize and visualize your portfolio.

Tags are also an efficient way to quickly get the context of an application, without having to look at each survey answer. For instance, when you see application tags such as “CRITICAL”, “CRM”, or “GoToCloud” you instantly understand that this CRM application is critical to the business and is targeted to be moved to the Cloud.

As a Portfolio Manager, you can create tags from several places in CAST Highlight:

From MANAGE PORTFOLIO > Manage Tags: this is the central place where you can create, edit, and delete tags. You can also get the list of applications being tagged. This is probably the best place to start, especially if you already know in advance how you want to segment your application portfolio.

From DASHBOARDS > Application Results: You can also create tags and attach them to applications from this page. This is the best place to start if you want to tag applications on the fly as you explore results. From here, you can sort and filter applications on specific metrics, then select the applications you want to tag and click on “Manage Tags”. Select the tag(s) you want to attach to your application selection if they already exist, or simply type your text to create a new tag.

From the Application Page: You can create or attach existing tags to an application from its ID card page. This is also a good spot if you want to work with context-based tags as you can quickly access all metrics and survey answers for a given application.

Use cases for using application tags

Used alone or along with other filters (domains, technologies, survey answers, etc.), tags provide meta information for applications that will filter CAST Highlight dashboards based on specific criteria. Tags are useful to support multiple use cases. Below are just a few examples:

– Support internal application nomenclature
– Filter dashboards by development team, vendor, etc.
– Define Cloud migration targets
– Exclude from dashboard views the applications you plan to retire
– Focus on applications having critical vulnerabilities which will be addressed through a dedicated action plan

To filter CAST Highlight dashboards based on a tag or a combination of tags (the “OR” logic applies when multiple tags are selected), expand the filter menu and select the tags you want to apply.

Export & API

Application tags are reported in the different exports available on the platform:

– PowerPoint export
– XML export
– CSV export

Finally you can get application tags but also manage these tags (i.e. create/edit/remove tags and attach them to applications) from our public API:

– Get tags: https://rpa.casthighlight.com/api-doc/index.html#/Tags/getTagsByDomainId
– Create/Edit tags: https://rpa.casthighlight.com/api-doc/index.html#/Tags/createOrUpdtateTag
– Delete tags: https://rpa.casthighlight.com/api-doc/index.html#/Tags/deleteTag
– Attach tags to applications: https://rpa.casthighlight.com/api-doc/index.html#/Tags/addTagToApplications
– Remove tags from applications: https://rpa.casthighlight.com/api-doc/index.html#/Tags/deleteTagFromApplications

That’s all folks! Don’t hesitate to share this article or tag a friend who might be interested…😊