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Labeling best practices

Introduction

Nanitor labels are primarily used in our prioritization score calculations but can also be used in various filtering screens. They are critical to the prioritization score calculations, so it is very important to ensure everything is labeled correctly and each label is rated appropriately for your organization. This article aims to provide some guidance to this end.

Approaches to labeling

Each device can have multiple labels so you can tag all the different groups a machine belongs to. Some of the type of labels that is good to have:

  • Application or service it supports. For example, POS servers, Billing systems, Web stores, Databases, etc.
  • Device criticality. For example Revenue Generating, Critical Back office, Test systems, Demo systems, etc.
  • Physical Location labels: Seattle, Dallas, London, Amsterdam, Munich, etc.
  • Logical Location: Primary, Secondary, HQ, Cloud, Lab, etc.

As well as any other ways you like to group your systems together. Application/Service labels as well as Device Criticality labels are highly recommended in addition to any other labels that work for you.

For help with creating labels and statically applying them, check out https://help.nanitor.com/article/44-how-do-i-label-my-devices. For help with automatically applying labels, check out https://help.nanitor.com/article/112-automatic-device-labeling

Label Rating

As stated, before issue prioritization does not work right unless you both label every device in your environment and assign ratings to each label. For the exact mechanics of doing that check out https://help.nanitor.com/article/44-how-do-i-label-my-devices. Let us talk about some approaches and best practices when deciding how to rate a particular label. Here is how the screen looks like

As you are going through this exercise it is good to think in relative terms. It is good to start by identifying in your head what the most critical assets are in your organization, then find a label that captures all of them or create a new label that captures them. Then move down the criticality scale. 

Three sliders need to be set independently so let's discuss them each:

  • Confidentiality: For the devices that have this label how big of a deal is it that the data on it remains confidential? Your public-facing servers should get a very low number. Your billing and financial servers are probably pretty high numbers.
  • Integrity: For the devices with this label how important is it that data on them are not changed by unauthorized parties? That is does the data on them need to keep their integrity or is it OK if anyone messes with them any way they want? Maybe this label is for lab devices, and it is not supposed to contain anything but bogus data anyway, so it gets a low number. Maybe this label is for servers that contain important documents that are critical to remaining authoritative, then this gets a high score.
  • Availability: Does it matter if the devices with this label go offline for an extended period? If not give availability a low number. If the company loses money for every minute these devices are down give it a high rating.

How can I get a report of assets that have no label assigned?

Simple. Go to the Inventory menu and click on Assets. Then click on the Labels filter and expand the dropdown and put a check next to (Unlabeled).