Why did I lose my tags or custom alerts on my cloned deployment or server array?

Background

When cloning a Deployment or a Server Array, there is currently a known limitation which omits tags or custom alerts on your Server Array or Deployment. This article explains these limitations and attempts to point out some workarounds.

Answer

When cloned, a server array or deployment will likely lose it's Tags and any Custom Alerts that you've created.

1. Tags - When cloned, a server array will lose its tags. These are the tags on the actual array itself, and not necessarily the voting tags.

For example, if you tag an actual array with multiple tags by going to Manage -> Arrays -> (Select your Array) -> Edit Tags, then subsequently clone the deployment containing the server array, the new cloned array's tags will be missing.

These are the tags we are speaking of -

Workarounds: For the time being, the only workaround is to clone the server array itself instead of the Deployment linked to the array.

To do so, navigate to Manage -> Arrays -> (Select your array) -> Clone. This new array will maintain the tags of the old array

NOTE: When cloning the array itself, note that the cloned array will still be linked to the original deployment, so this isn't a true workaround to the original problem.

The only other workaround is to manually recreate the tags on the new cloned server array in the cloned deployment.

2. Custom Alerts - When you clone a deployment, any custom alerts specified on the "Next Alerts" tab of an array will be removed as well.

The alerts can be found under the Manage -> Arrays -> (Select your array) -> Next Alerts tab, like so -

When the parent deployment of a server array is cloned, any custom defined alerts in here will be destroyed.

Workarounds: The best workaround for this is to define any custom alerts on the Server Template associated with the Server Array, as opposed to defining them on the server array itself.

This means that you may need to clone/revision a separate server template that has the alerts needed just for the array, since other servers/instances that use the template may not need those custom alerts.

When cloning a parent deployment, any alerts defined in the server template associated with the array will carry over to the new server array in the cloned deployment.

RightScale is aware of these limitations and has opened internal bug reports to track them. We may likely see a fix sometime in the near future for both of these issues, but for now this article remains in effect.

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