In this article, we will explore the hidden tag that will allow you to display a friendly name for your resources in Azure Portal.
We all know that it is not possible to rename Azure resources. And sometimes, these resources are created automatically with not familiar or easily recognizable names.
Did you notice that Azure Portal sometimes shows a friendly name next to the resource name? That shows after the real resource name, and it is displayed only in Azure Portal like this:
But where does that friendly name come from? And is that limited to only specific types of resources?
How to add a friendly name to Azure Resources
Luckily, it looks like we can exploit this undocumented feature and add our friendly name to most of the Azure Resource types.
This value is stored in a hidden Azure Tag called hidden-title , and it is not part of the resource name.
I wrote about hidden tags in Azure in my previous blog post: Hidden Azure Tags. Check it out to find out how to add and work with hidden tags.
hidden-title is a specific hidden tag that holds that title value you can see after the resource name in Azure Portal.
As an example, here are some resources without that friendly name:
And here is the same Azure Portal view after adding the hidden tag. Isn’t this much more descriptive?
When to add a Friendly Name to your Azure Resources
In my opinion, a solid resource naming convention is still very important. But sometimes, we have to deal with undescriptive or generated resource names. Adding this additional title to your resource names can help identify these resources while browsing the Azure Portal. Using it too much and adding it to every resource is unnecessary and can clutter the view (like in the example above).
You might notice that some Azure resources already have this hidden tag assigned (that is how I discovered it). There is almost no public documentation on this, and I am unsure what this can break. Therefore I wouldn’t suggest changing that.
While this can be used programmatically, I would not add this tag only to be used by the script. We can use a different tag instead.
Beware that this is not a standard or well-documented practice, and it can also cause confusion within your environment.
Using the hidden-title tag is an easy way to simplify the resource identification where it makes sense.
Thanks for visiting and keep clouding around.
Vukašin Terzić