Best Practices for Using Tags, Glossary Terms, and Custom Fields

Tags, Glossary Terms, and Custom Fields are powerful tools in Metric Insights for organizing, describing, and enriching your data Elements.

Here are some general best practices for using them:

  • Maintain consistency in naming conventions and usage across your organization.
  • Regularly review and update Tags, Glossary Terms, and Custom Fields to ensure relevance.
  • Provide training to content creators on how to effectively use these features.
  • Use automation (like Autosync/Autoimport) where possible to keep information up-to-date.

Differences and individual best practices are presented in the table below.


 Tags Glossary Terms Custom Fields
Requires Privileges to create: Yes/No No Yes Yes
Usage
  • For quick, informal categorization of Elements.
  • For grouping related Elements across different Categories.
  • For temporary or ad-hoc groupings.
  • For formal, standardized definitions of business concepts.
  • Associate terms with specific Elements to provide context and improve searchability.
  • To add specific, structured metadata to Elements.
  • For important information that needs to be easily searchable or filterable.
Naming 

Keep Tags simple and concise
  • Construct an actual business glossary by using key business terms depending on the focus of your business.
  • Adhere to approaches to creating business glossaries adopted by modern data catalog and intelligence tools such as Collibra, Atlan, Alation, etc.
 Keep Custom Fields and their Values simple, concise, and descriptive
Examples beta, development, production
  • Section: Finance & Accounting
  • Terms: Net Profit, EBITDA, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, Asset Management, Return on Equity (ROE).
  • Section: Data Sensitivity
  • Custom Field: PII
  • Values: Internal, Public, Restricted, Confidential
Organizing and maintaining
  • Pay attention to spelling because it's easy to create both "development" and "develpoment" Tags due to the absence of spellcheck.
  • Avoid redundancy like "startup" and "start-up".
  • Delete unused Tags.
  • Organize Terms into meaningful Sections for easy navigation.
  • Include detailed Definitions and Descriptions for each term.
  • Assign Owners and Stewards to maintain data governance.
  • Group related Custom Fields into Sections for better organization.
  • Use different Field types (single value, multi-value, text, etc.) as appropriate for the data.
  • Pay attention to whom (everyone/Groups) and where the Custom Filed can be visible: 
    • Search Results
    • Search Left Filter Pane
    • Tile Preview
    • Tile Hover Information
    • Request Access Dialog
    • Element and/or Dataset Viewer
Automation No automation available Use Glossary Autoimport and Glossary Autosync Use Custom Field Autosync