Custom dimensions

Teams, features, customers and users are built in. Custom dimensions add your own, such as environment, cost center or business unit, and Explore groups and filters by each as it does by any other. Find them under Settings, Projects, in a project's menu, under Custom dimensions.

Where a value comes from

Each line's value on a custom dimension is read in this order:

1. Tag keys, in the order you list them; the first present wins. Keys match as owner tag keys do: case, separators and the user_ prefix AWS adds are ignored. A workspace's tags come first where the line has one, and the tags of the identity that made the call last.
2. Accounts: where no tag gives a value, the value you set for the account the line was billed in, such as 111122223333: production for a production AWS account.
3. Kubernetes labels: what a Kubernetes cluster still leaves unset is divided among its workloads, each read by the same tag keys and aliases from its labels, in the order the cluster reads owners: a pod's own, its workload's, its namespace's, then its node's. A workload with no such label stays Not set.

A line with neither is shown as Not set. It is never spread across values to look complete.

Aliases

Tags are often written several ways. An alias reads each of them as one value: production: prod, prd, Production reads all four as production. Aliases ignore case.

In Explore

Each custom dimension is a tab under Group by, and can be the second dimension or a filter. Like the owners, it is explained line by line on its own, so a view names at most one of team, feature, customer, user, a Kubernetes cluster, namespace or workload, or a custom dimension; it can be crossed with the provider, account, region, service and model. Links and reports name it by its key, such as tag:environment, which stays the same when you rename it.

Changing one

Adding, changing or removing a custom dimension explains every period again with the new definition, in the background. Explore shows a notice until it is done. Every figure on the dimension adds up to the bill, checked as every other dimension is. A project has up to 10 custom dimensions.