Hi all,
We'd like to create Service Groups (Applications → Service Groups) based on a custom field present on our data (e.g. toto.id_service, an internal business identifier attached to our services), but the "Select services" KQL query only accepts a closed set of dimensions:
agent.nameservice.nameservice.language.nameservice.environmentlabels.<xyz>
Our custom field isn't part of this list and isn't exposed as a labels.* field either, so we can't use it to build a group.
From digging into the docs and GitHub history, I understand this is a known design constraint rather than a bug:
- Docs: Services | Elastic Docs (Service groups section lists the supported dimensions and still flags the feature as beta)
- Design discussion: [APM] Evaluate technical design of Service Groups · Issue #128634 · elastic/kibana · GitHub — the team chose to query aggregated transaction/span/app metrics directly (for scalability) rather than raw events, and explicitly noted at the time: "Custom labels are not currently available on transaction and span metrics."
Our use case: we tag our services with internal business/organizational identifiers (e.g. toto.id_service) at ingestion time, and we'd like to use these identifiers — not just labels.* — to automatically build Service Groups that reflect our organizational structure, without needing a 1:1 manual mapping per service.
Questions / feature request:
- Is there a plan to extend Service Groups to support arbitrary custom fields/dimensions beyond the current fixed list, provided they're available on the transaction/span/app metrics documents?
- If not, is there a recommended path to get a custom field included in the metrics aggregation dimensions (e.g. via APM Server / Fleet integration config), so it could at least be used through
labels.<xyz>? - Is this tracked in an existing GitHub issue we could follow/upvote?
Thanks!
Environment: Elastic Stack 9.4.x, Elastic Cloud Hosted, OTel-based ingestion.