Tagging best practices

Knowledge Checkpoint

A grasp of these concepts will help you understand this documentation better:

• Tags
• Content endorsement
• Content archiving

Why use tags

As your BI platform grows, finding the right dashboards, datasets, or reports becomes harder. Tags create a shared language that helps your team quickly discover, trust, and collaborate around data. With tags, you can:

• Search faster: Use tags to search for related items.
• Endorse trusted items: Mark items as endorsed to signal that they’re trusted.
• Archive outdated items: Keep your workspace clean by hiding items that are no longer relevant.

Tips to build tags

Start small with a few tags

• Start simple: Don’t overthink when first creating your tag list. You don’t need to plan everything out beforehand; just start with a simple list of tags that can be applied to your current workspace.
• Iterate along the way: Tags can be refactored later to adapt to your organization's use cases. Remember, the tool should serve you, not the other way around.

tip

Use our recommended tag list to get a quick start.

Utilize built-in tags

Holistics supports some built-in tags with special mechanisms that you can start with:

• Endorsed tag: Mark content as trusted and reliable (See setup guide).
• Archive tag: Helps hide outdated objects without permanently deleting them (See setup guide).

Organize tags into categories

With related tags, you can group them by categories, which helps users answer their questions when looking for items:

• Topic tags: What is this item about? For example: topic/sales-ops, topic/customer-success, topic/call-center, etc.
• Status tags: Is it ready to use? For example: status/draft, status/review, status/active, etc.
• Owner tags: Who is responsible for this? For example: owner/finance-team, owner/sales, owner/data-team, etc.
• Issue tags: Is there anything I should be aware of? For example: issue/stale-data, issue/under-maintenance, issue/confidential, etc.

tip

Use a prefix (e.g., dept/finance) to group related tags.

Combine with an automation workflow

Enhance your workflow by auto-adding or removing tags with the Tagging System API. Some of the example use cases that you can reference:

Use case 1: Mark broken dashboards/datasets

• When a pipeline fails, you can call the add tag API to mark affected dashboards/datasets (e.g., issue/broken).
• Once fixed, you can call the remove tag API to remove it.

Use case 2: Schedule regular reviews

In your workflow, you can set a schedule (e.g., monthly, quarterly) to call the add tag API to:

• Mark items that need to be reviewed (e.g., action/need-review)
• Assign the person in charge (e.g., maintainer/James)

Your turn!

tip

Still don’t know what to do? Use our recommended tag list to get a quick start.

Have a tagging pattern that works well for your team? Share it with the community to help others get started faster.