EC2 autoscaling does not put name (tag) on servers

joelpoloney picture joelpoloney · Oct 10, 2012 · Viewed 7.5k times · Source

I've created an autoscaling group on EC2 and it's working just fine. Servers scale up and down depending on load. I'd like to have a little more info on the management side and am wondering if there's a way to get the autoscaling group to dynamically add names to the instances that it boots up. I'm referring to adding a Tag with key=Name and value=autogeneratedid.

For example, if I had an autoscaling group called test-group, servers would boot up with the following names:

test-group-1
test-group-2
test-group-3
...

I'd like to find them an enumerate them in the EC2 Management Console, but right now they're just showing up as "empty" names (the Tag key=Name isn't explicitly set on the instances).

Any ideas?

Answer

Eric Hammond picture Eric Hammond · Oct 10, 2012

In order to get the tags to be set on the instances, make sure you are setting the PropagateAtLaunch flag ("p=1") for the tag in the Auto Scaling Group.

You'll want to read this section in Amazon's documentation:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AutoScaling/latest/DeveloperGuide/ASTagging.html

As far as having Amazon dynamically adding parameters to the tag value, I'm not aware of any such feature.