---
title: "Tags: Tagging Through Propagation"
url: "https://atlan.com/demos/tagging-through-propagation/"
description: "Experience seamless data governance with Atlan, effortlessly propagating tags through lineage to ensure critical assets are consistently identified across your data landscape."
format: "Video"
video: "https://videos.ctfassets.net/nwa1c00rtgxb/6sK7LVhT1COZmFVz4WwKHy/4b0233d8e5347b66380729be404f463c/Tagging_through_propagation.mp4"
content_purpose: ["Product Overview"]
target_persona: ["General", "Data Steward", "Data Engineer"]
journey_stage: ["S2 - Discovery", "C1 - Onboarding", "C2 - First Value", "C3 - Adoption"]
use_case_context: ["Training"]
product: ["Data Marketplace - Data Governance"]
content_type: "video transcript"
transcript_source: "contentful"
---

# Tags: Tagging Through Propagation

Transcript of the video at https://atlan.com/demos/tagging-through-propagation/

<!-- Body: machine transcript stored on the Contentful entry (field contentBody), timestamps kept, product names corrected. Not yet edited by a person. -->

Tagging through propagation

Steven Hloros: [00:00] When applying tags in Atlan, the option to propagate a tag is available. Whether we want to push a tag on a column through lineage, or a table down to its columns, we can set the propagation of a tag when applying it to an asset. This can save immense amounts of time as we do not have to try to work through lineage or manually tag all columns in a table. For us, we have a source Postgres database that feeds into our Snowflake warehouse, and with Fivetran giving us lineage from Postgres, we can take advantage of tagging an asset in the source and propagating that tag all the way downstream. This can be applied to any data sets that have lineage, whether table to table, table to dashboard, or column to field element. If there is lineage for the asset, the propagation downstream can be done.

For us, we want to move forward with tagging a P I I level 3 asset in our Postgres database and propagating it through lineage to Snowflake. In the asset discovery we search for customer_mobile, which represents our customer's mobile number and was deemed as the most critical asset that we have. We click on the customer_mobile column asset from Postgres to view the overview. We will check the lineage to see where [01:00] this column goes downstream. Clicking on the lineage tab and view graph takes us to the visual representation of the lineage of customer_mobile. We can see immediately a table in Snowflake that the column goes to, and by clicking on the expand all icon, we see that the column flows to many different data assets, all the way down to a dashboard. Instead of spending time tagging each of these assets individually, we will utilize the propagation through lineage on our source asset in Postgres. We click on the plus sign for Tags and select the P I I level 3 tag checkbox. Hovering over the circle on the left will show a popup telling us that the tag is not currently propagating. Additionally, at the bottom of the tags popup, it shows a summary of the total number of tags applied to this asset that are set to propagate, which is currently set to none. To change the propagation setting on our newly applied tag, we click on the edit button, and can now select whether or not to enable propagation. For a column, the only way that we can propagate is through lineage, so we will enable propagation and click on update. Then we will save our newly applied tag. The tag will apply to our base asset and begin [02:00] propagating through lineage.

After a few moments, our tag propagation will complete. Clicking on the immediate column downstream of our source asset we can see that the tag has been applied to this asset. If we hover over the P I I Level 3 tag, we can actually see that it is being propagated to this asset from our source column, and if we click on the name we are taken back to the asset profile of customer_mobile where we applied the propagated tag. Now if we go all the way downstream to a dashboard where this column flows to, we can even see that the propagation has pushed all the way down to this asset. One key note is that we cannot remove the tag on a downstream asset individually, and to remove it, we would need to either remove the tag from the initial asset or update the propagation of the tag we initially applied to none. Doing this will remove the tag from all downstream assets.

With just a simple change in the tag application, we have tagged over 10 assets, making sure that we have tagged everywhere that our critical data asset flows.