Tag rules

Tag rules automatically assign or remove tags from devices. This helps you automatically organize and manage tags on your devices. If a tag is assigned to a device using a tag rule, and the device later evaluates to

false

, the tag will be automatically removed from the device. You can also manually assign tags to individual devices. For more information, see Assign a tag.

Example:

If a device you manually assigned tags to is located in the Portland office and the user transfers to the Austin office, you will need to remove the Portland tag from the device and then assign the Austin tag. If you use tag rules to assign tags and the user transfers to Austin, the tag rule for Portland will evaluate to

false

and automatically remove the Portland tag. When the tag rule for the Austin office evaluates to

True

, the Austin tag will be assigned to the device.

Tag rules are independent of each other and there are no priorities like those used in policy rule sets. Multiple tags can be assigned to a device using tag rules. As long as each tag rule evaluates to

True

, the tag will be assigned. For example, a device can have both an Austin office tag and an Engineering tag assigned to it.

The same tag cannot be applied both manually and automatically. The reasons behind this are as follows:

For automatic tagging to be useful, you want the tags to reflect a device’s current state, not the device's past state. This means tags have to be able to be assigned and removed from devices automatically to reflect their current state. In the example above, a device originally sat in the Portland office. When the user transferred to Austin, it would have both Portland and Austin tags assigned unless the Portland tag was removed.
If you can manually remove a tag that was assigned by a tag rule, it is no longer deterministic. For example, if you have 10 devices that should have the same tag assigned, but the tag can be manually removed from one device, you wouldn't have any way of knowing why the tag wasn't applied to that device. You might wonder if there was an issue with the rule.

Tag rules are evaluated in the following scenarios:

Newly created tag rules will evaluate against all devices.
Edited tag rules will evaluate against all devices.
A report of updated device attributes will evaluate all tag rules against that device.