Level 0 - Team tag coverage scorecard rule

This rule provides a score based on the presence of team tags within your systems estate. This document explains the interpretation of your score and offers guidance on actions you can take to enhance your tagging strategy.

The score is based on the most recent entity scan and fails if the target entity does not have a value for their “team” tag.

How to interpret your score

Your team tag coverage score represents the percentage of entities in your system that have proper team ownership tags. Here's how to understand your results:

• High score (80-100%): Most entities have clear team ownership, enabling effective alert routing and accountability
• Medium score (50-79%): Moderate coverage with opportunities to improve team ownership clarity
• Low score (0-49%): Limited team tagging that may cause alert routing issues and unclear ownership

Poor team tag coverage can significantly impact your organization's ability to respond effectively to incidents. Without clear team ownership:

• Alerts may not reach the right people, delaying incident response
• Teams may struggle to understand which services they're responsible for
• Coordination during complex incidents becomes more difficult
• Service ownership and accountability becomes unclear

Recommended actions

Use these strategies to improve your team tag coverage score:

1. Define your team structure and ownership model

Establish clear team definitions and boundaries:

• Map your organizational structure and identify distinct teams
• Define ownership boundaries for different types of services
• Consider operational support teams, product teams, and development teams
• Account for shared services and cross-team dependencies
• Document team responsibilities and escalation paths

2. Develop team tagging standards

Create consistent tagging conventions for your organization:

• Standardize team naming conventions (e.g., "frontend-team", "payments-api-team")
• Consider different team types (development, operations, product, security)
• Account for organizational structures like tribes, squads, or business units
• Plan for team changes and reorganizations
• Document tagging guidelines and share them across teams

3. Implement systematic team tagging

Ensure tags are applied consistently across your infrastructure:

• Use environment variables to set team tags during agent deployment
• Configure agent extensions to automatically apply team ownership tags
• Integrate with infrastructure-as-code tools to enforce team tagging
• Create deployment templates that require team ownership information

4. Leverage organizational data sources

Automate team tagging from existing systems:

• Sync team information from HR systems or organizational directories
• Integrate with project management tools like Jira or Azure DevOps
• Connect with source code management systems to derive team ownership
• Use configuration management databases (CMDBs) like ServiceNow for team data

5. Customize the rule for your organization

Adapt the scorecard to match your specific team structure:

• Modify the rule to include your organization's team naming conventions
• Add validation for multiple team-related tags if needed (e.g., primary team, support team)
• Include related tags like business unit, product area, or cost center
• Set up different rules for different types of services or environments

6. Establish team ownership processes

Create governance around team ownership:

• Assign team ownership responsibilities and accountability
• Establish processes for updating team tags when ownership changes
• Create dashboards that show team coverage and ownership gaps
• Implement regular audits of team tag accuracy and completeness

Important considerations

Keep these factors in mind when working with your team tag coverage score:

Plan for organizational change: Team structures evolve over time. Design your tagging strategy to be flexible enough to accommodate reorganizations, team mergers, and new team formations.

Consider shared ownership: Some services may have multiple teams involved. Plan for scenarios where services have primary owners and secondary support teams, and tag accordingly.

Balance granularity with simplicity: While detailed team information is valuable, overly complex team hierarchies can become difficult to maintain. Find the right balance for your organization.

Align with alerting strategy: Ensure your team tags align with your alert routing and escalation procedures. Tags should facilitate effective incident response, not create confusion.

Account for external dependencies: Some services may be owned by external vendors or partner teams. Plan how to handle these scenarios in your tagging strategy.

Next steps

To improve your team tag coverage:

1. Start with critical services: Begin by ensuring your most important business services have clear team ownership tags
2. Automate where possible: Integrate team tagging into your deployment processes to ensure consistency
3. Validate alert routing: Test that team tags properly route alerts to the right teams
4. Monitor and maintain: Regularly audit team tag accuracy and update tags as teams and ownership change

Clear team ownership through consistent tagging creates accountability, improves incident response times, and enables better coordination across your organization's observability and operations efforts.