# Service Groups: support custom/arbitrary fields (not just labels) for grouping services

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/service-groups-support-custom-arbitrary-fields-not-just-labels-for-grouping-services/391184>\
**Category:** APM\
**Tags:** open-telemetry\
**Created:** [October 26, 2026, 8:25am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/service-groups-support-custom-arbitrary-fields-not-just-labels-for-grouping-services/391184 "2026-10-26T08:25:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![QuentinG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/dec6dc/32.png) [@QuentinG](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/QuentinG)\
**Post date:** [October 26, 2026, 8:25am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/service-groups-support-custom-arbitrary-fields-not-just-labels-for-grouping-services/391184/1 "2026-10-26T08:25:30Z")

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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.name`
- `service.name`
- `service.language.name`
- `service.environment`
- `labels.<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](https://www.elastic.co/docs/solutions/observability/apm/services) (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](https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/128634) — 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:**

1. 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?
2. 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>`?
3. 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.