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Manual Tags

Manual Tags allow you to categorize and group related resources such as repositories and organizations, based on custom-defined labels. These tags improve visibility, prioritization, and filtering across the platform, especially in the dashboard and findings pages.

Examples of common tags include:

  • critical — for infrastructure-critical repositories.
  • outsourced — for third-party maintained assets.
  • non-prod — to differentiate staging or development environments.

These names are all custom and not standard. Once created and assigned, Manual Tags become accessible across Boost’s filtering tools to streamline audits, reporting, and triage.

Some Important Use Cases

  • Prioritize critical infrastructure by filtering security findings from assets tagged critical.
  • Track outsourced codebases to apply different risk review policies.
  • Segment dashboards based on business unit or environment (marketing, non-prod, etc.).
  • Support governance efforts by grouping legacy, shadow, or manually maintained repositories.

Creating Manual Tags

Creating a manual tag requires the Admin role.

Follow the steps below to create a manual tag:

  1. Navigate to the Asset Management page.

  2. Click the Actions dropdown in the upper right corner of the page and select Manage Manual Tags.

    Asset Management Actions

  3. In the pop-up modal, type your desired tag name (max 25 characters), and click the Add button.

    Add tag name

Note

⚠️ Tags must be unique (see Tag Naming Rules). Use consistent naming conventions (e.g., critical, non-prod, 3rd-party).

Tag Naming Rules

A tag name can be up to 25 characters long.

Tag uniqueness is evaluated on a normalized form of the name rather than on the exact text entered. Two names that normalize to the same value are considered the same tag, and the second one is rejected. When checking for duplicates, Boost Security normalizes the name as follows:

  • Ignores letter case: Critical and critical are the same tag.
  • Converts accented and other non-ASCII letters to their closest ASCII equivalent: Café and cafe are the same tag.
  • Treats spaces, underscores, punctuation, and other symbols (such as &, +, #, or /) as separators, and merges consecutive separators into one: non prod, non_prod, non-prod, and non--prod are the same tag.
  • Ignores separators at the beginning and at the end of the name: -legacy- and legacy are the same tag.

For example, when the tags in the right column already exist, the names in the left column are rejected:

Tag name entered Conflicts with an existing tag named
Non Prod non-prod
THIRD_PARTY third-party
Équipe Paie equipe-paie
Legacy! legacy
R&D r-d

Assigning Tags to Resources

Assigning or unassigning manual tags requires the User role or the Admin role. A tag must already exist before it can be assigned; see Creating Manual Tags.

Once created, you can assign Manual Tags to one or more repositories:

  1. Select one or more repositories from the Asset Management page.

  2. Click the Actions button and choose Assign Manual Tags.

    Assign Tags Option

  3. In the modal, check the boxes next to the tags you want to apply and click Update to finalize.

    Assign tag to reseource

Note

You can assign multiple tags to a single resource.

Deleting Manual Tags

Deleting a manual tag requires the Admin role.

To delete a tag:

  1. Click the Actions dropdown in the upper right corner of the page and select Manage Manual Tags.

    Asset Management Actions

  2. Click the trash icon next to the tag you want to remove.

    Delete Tag

  3. Based on whether the tag is currently in use, one of the following confirmation prompts will appear:

    1. Unassigned Tag: If the tag is not associated with any assets, a simple confirmation dialog will appear. Click the Delete Manual Tag button to confirm the removal of the tag.

      Unassigned Tag

    2. Assigned Tag: If the tag is currently applied to one or more resources, a warning dialog will notify you: "🚫Deleting a tag will remove it from all associated resources. This action cannot be undone." Review the impact carefully, then click Delete Manual Tag button to confirm and proceed with deletion.

      Assigned Tag

Filtering by Several Manual Tags

When you select several manual tags in a manual tag filter, the Match any / Match all selector above the tag list sets how the tags combine:

  • Match any (default): shows the items that carry at least one of the selected tags.
  • Match all: shows only the items that carry every selected tag.

Match all selected in the manual tag filter

The selector is available on every view that offers a manual tag filter, including the Dashboard, Findings, Asset Management, Scanner Coverage, SBOM, Supply Chain Inventory, Posture Reports, Security Events, Compliance, and Projects.

When Match all is selected:

  • The Select All option is hidden from the tag list.
  • If Select All was applied, the selection becomes the explicit list of the tags it covered.
  • The applied manual tag filter in the Search For bar shows Match all before the selected tags. A filter in Match any mode shows only the tags.

Match all shown in the Search For bar

You can pick the mode before selecting any tag; it applies to the tags you select next.

To build a view that shows only the items carrying several tags, for example those tagged both critical and non-prod:

  1. Open the manual tag filter on any of the views listed above.
  2. Select Match all.
  3. Select the critical and non-prod tags.
  4. Check that the applied manual tag filter in the Search For bar shows Match all.
  5. Copy the page URL to share the view; it keeps the selected tags and the match mode.