Selecting human-readable account names for accountID tag in Datadog dashboards

Hello we have a tag for accountID. On our dashboards we would like to be able to select a human readable account name that corresponds to this value. Is there some way to do this in datadog?

Mike, you likely have multiple options to address this.

the following come to mind
• pipeline remapper
• tagging
• reference tables
in my opinion, tagging is likely the simplest option, however i personally would evaluate using reference tables with a pipeline modification to create a new attribute.

For example, say you have account id’s 001 002 003
You can create a reference table that will associated each id with a custom value like HQ, CloudProd, CustomerX

Then, in your logging pipeline, add a step to create a new attribute based on the lookup table and add it as a facet.

This way you now have a new custom filed you can search with that gives you a human friendly name anytime the id’s in your reference tables are in a log

Oh, it might be worth pointing out that if the accountid your looking at is the account id for one of your datadog cloud integrations, its super easy to edit a existing integrations to add a tag

Supporting:
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/add-context-with-reference-tables/
https://docs.datadoghq.com/getting_started/tagging/

for existing integrations, under account details you can add a tag which will be applied to any logs from that source account.

example

These tags are custom and represent tenants in our services

ah okay, if im following your use case correctly then. sounds like a lookup table could be a better option since you want to add a human friendly name for the account id of your tenants

Mostly what we want is to be able to select specific account names in our template variables on our dashboards and be able to filter by a particular customer

yep, turning your lookup table into a facet in your logs would enable you to do that

Can lookup tables work in cases where the metrics aren’t generated from log ingest?

if the account id’s you are looking at exist in your datadog “logs” area the lookup table should work

We aren’t using logs in datadog but suppose we ingested a single log and set up accountID as a faucet. We could then filter other metrics?

so you are generating events, the ones seen under event management?

Events support “enrich and normalize” options, which can be used to achieve the same outcome i described

These aren’t under events. I think these are metrics coming from datadog agent and collected as prometheus metrics

ah okay, in that case, you will likely want to add tags at the agent level which can provide a human friendly name for each host that is related to your account ids

Doo you have a docs reference that explains how to do this or a keyword to search?

https://docs.datadoghq.com/getting_started/tagging/assigning_tags/?tab=noncontainerizedenvironments

you need to add tags to the agent config file

I don’t see how I can do this transformation. Are you sure it can be done this way?