# Grouping & filtering Once you have installed the Appear agent and it is connected (reporting) you will see your instance of the Appear platform begin to instantly populate with your services, resources, and references. You may wish to organise your services to be more meaningfully arranged based on your role, their association to a project, a team, or anything in between. This can be done with grouping and filtering. ## Grouping services ### Overview Organising services is handled with tags. This allows greater flexibility for all personas using your APIs. The only prerequisite to using tags is that you have a service present in your Catalog view. Tags are a free-form way to add extra dimensions to your services. These are added from the services detail column; accessed by clicking on an individual service in the Catalog view.

Image showing the menu open after typing # (hash/pound) to insert a new tag or select an existing one.

### Grouping your services Now that you have one (or many tags) in your Appear account, you can begin grouping services present in your service list by one or many tags. {% stepper %} {% step %} ### Open the grouping menu Click on the grouping icon in the left most column, next to the filter icon.

The grouping icon is next to the filter icon, at the top of the service list column

{% endstep %} {% step %} ### Select Tags Select 'Tags' from the menu, which then allows your to select one or many tags, which will the group your services accordingly. You can search for specific tags, or you can use glob patterns to cover many similar tags.

The grouping menu provides two options: connection status and tags

{% hint style="info" %} Note: Tags are flexible, so one service may exist in many tag groups. This may result in some of your services appearing several times in the service list, which is by design. {% endhint %} {% endstep %} {% step %} ### Group by connection status A further dimension to your grouping can be via the connection status. This is useful in the early stages of the integrating Appear agent and any debugging required. {% endstep %} {% endstepper %} ### Ungrouping your services Grouping services is limited to your account, and is designed to be a flexible and fluid way to arrange what you care about in the moment. It is simple to ungroup your services, which doesn't delete any of the underlying relationships (handled via tags). #### Ungrouping options * Click on the '**x**' next to the grouping tag visible on the services list column * Click on the selected tags in the grouping menu, this will deslect them * Click on **Deselect All** within the grouping menu in the **Tags** submenu ### Grouping behaviours The grouping functionality has some basic behaviours which are nice to be aware of as you navigate the Appear platform. 1. Selecting or deselecting groups persists across different environments or branches 2. A single service can be assigned to multiple tags, and therefore multiple groups, which means it will be present in those groups 3. Selecting a services present in multiple groups will show it selected multiple times in the service list view ### Grouping FAQs
Are my services groups seen by my team? No, your service groupings are only visible to you, which means you can play around and customise your grouping based on your specific needs.
How are service groups established? Grouping services is handled via tags. Once you've added a tag to a service (or many services) you can choose the tags in the grouping menu.
*** ## Filtering services Next to the grouping button icon there is the filter button icon. Clicking this will open a similar menu to the grouping menu, however offers another layer of how to arrange what is relevant to you in the moment.
Filtering works independently or in combination with grouping, allowing you to fine-tune your view. You can filter services by: * **Tags** * **Connection status** (Active, Stale, Lost, Waiting to connect, No Connection) This makes it easy to focus on a subset of services — whether you’re troubleshooting, reviewing deployments, or exploring a specific part of your system. *** If you have any queries or require support with the above instructions, please [get in touch](/getting-started/get-in-touch.md) with us. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.appear.sh/managing-your-apis/grouping-and-filtering.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.