I used to do this by identifying type of applications such as APP, DB, WEB. What is used in the past was vSphere Tags or Custom Attributes, both are good options and you can then create views in Aria for Operations to use in reports/dashboards.
The good thing about both of them is that when the VM gets deleted, the tag and custom attribute goes with it so you do not need to modify your reports as the collection will automatically remove the entries.