Governance

The Governance page helps you enforce tagging standards and track compliance across your multi-cloud infrastructure. Consistent tagging is the foundation of effective cost allocation, reporting, and accountability.

Tag Compliance Scoring

CLARITY evaluates your tagging practices and assigns a letter grade based on the percentage of resources that meet your tagging standards:

Grade	Compliance	Description
A	90-100%	Excellent — nearly all resources are properly tagged
B	75-89%	Good — most resources are tagged, some gaps remain
C	60-74%	Fair — significant tagging gaps affecting cost visibility
D	40-59%	Poor — majority of resources lack proper tags
F	Below 40%	Critical — tagging is largely absent

INFO

Your compliance grade is calculated across all connected cloud accounts. It reflects the overall health of your tagging strategy.

Untagged Resource Reporting

The untagged resources view lists every resource that is missing one or more required tags. For each resource, you can see:

• Resource name and type
• Provider and region
• Monthly cost — Helps prioritize which untagged resources to address first
• Missing tags — Which specific required tags are absent

Prioritizing Remediation

Sort untagged resources by cost to focus on the highest-impact gaps first. A $500/month untagged EC2 instance matters more than a $2/month CloudWatch log group.

TIP

Export the untagged resource list and share it with team leads. Assign ownership of tagging remediation by team or service area.

Per-Provider Compliance

Tagging compliance is tracked separately for each cloud provider, since tagging capabilities and conventions differ:

Provider	Tag System	Notes
AWS	Resource tags	Most services support tags; some (e.g., data transfer) do not
Azure	Resource tags	Tags supported on resource groups and individual resources
GCP	Labels	GCP uses "labels" instead of "tags" — CLARITY normalizes them

The per-provider view shows:

• Compliance grade for each provider
• Number of tagged vs. untagged resources
• Most commonly missing tag keys
• Trend over time (improving or declining)

WARNING

Some cloud resources do not support tags at all (e.g., certain networking components, data transfer charges). These are excluded from compliance calculations to avoid penalizing you unfairly.

Tag Distribution Analysis

Understand how your tags are actually being used:

Tag Key Coverage

See which tag keys are most and least applied:

Tag Key	Coverage	Resources
environment	85%	142 of 167
team	72%	120 of 167
project	58%	97 of 167
cost-center	31%	52 of 167

Tag Value Consistency

Identify inconsistent tag values that undermine your tagging strategy:

• environment: prod vs. environment: production vs. environment: PROD
• team: data-science vs. team: DataScience vs. team: ds

CLARITY flags these inconsistencies so you can standardize before they propagate.

Tag Growth Trend

Track how your tagging compliance changes over time:

• Weekly compliance score history
• New resources created with/without tags
• Resources that were recently tagged (remediation tracking)

How to Improve Your Compliance Grade

Step 1: Define Required Tags

Establish a minimum set of required tags for your organization. Common required tags include:

• environment (production, staging, development)
• team or department (owning team)
• project or application (what it supports)
• cost-center (for chargeback alignment)

Step 2: Audit Current State

Review the compliance dashboard to understand your starting point. Focus on the providers and resource types with the lowest compliance.

Step 3: Tag High-Cost Resources First

Sort untagged resources by monthly cost and address the most expensive ones first. This yields the biggest improvement in cost allocation accuracy.

Step 4: Enforce at Creation

Work with your infrastructure teams to enforce tagging at resource creation time:

• Use cloud provider tag policies (AWS Tag Policies, Azure Policy)
• Require tags in infrastructure-as-code templates
• Add tag validation to CI/CD pipelines

Step 5: Monitor Continuously

Check the governance dashboard weekly. Set a target grade (e.g., B or higher) and track progress toward it.

TIP

Improving from grade D to B typically takes 4-6 weeks of focused effort. Start with the top 3 required tag keys and expand from there.

Governance and Cost Allocation

Tag compliance directly impacts the accuracy of your Cost Allocation:

• High compliance (A/B) — Most costs can be automatically allocated to the correct cost center
• Low compliance (D/F) — Large portions of spend fall into the default "unallocated" bucket

Investing in governance pays dividends across reporting, chargeback, and optimization.

What's Next?

• Set up cost allocation rules
• View organization hierarchy
• Generate compliance reports