Filter datadog data by user id (or a similar, unique key with many possible values)

Question

Graphing Primer and Getting started with tags – Datadog suggest that Tags are the way to filter data, but the latter article cautions:

Please don't include endlessly growing tags in your metrics, like timestamps or user ids. Please limit each metric to 1000 tags.

So, if I want to filter by user id, how can I do that without using Tags?

Answer 1

The recommendation of:

"Please don't include endlessly growing tags in your metrics, like timestamps or user ids. Please limit each metric to 1000 tags."

Is more of a warning against using infinitely expanding values as they can drastically increase your custom metric usage. As mentioned in the following article:

https://help.datadoghq.com/hc/en-us/articles/204271775-What-is-a-custom-metric-and-what-is-the-limit-on-the-number-of-custom-metrics-I-can-have-

"By default customers are allotted 100 custom metrics per host across their entire infrastructure rather than on a per-host basis. For example if you were licensed for 3 hosts, you would have 300 custom metrics by default - these 300 metrics may be divided equally amongst each individual host, or all 300 metrics could be sent from a single host."

You will want to keep in mind when configuring your metrics/tags of your current allotment of custom metrics and any billing implications that may have. That said, if having these tags is important to your team please reach out to support@datadoghq.com and we can sync up with the Sales Team to determine what is best for your team and use case.