otterley - Don't walk away yet... we do support arbitrary dimensions!
You can attach any arbitrary set of tags to metrics or events - on a per-datapoint basis, and slice / dice / alert based on those tags. Datadog will automatically tag your points by chef role or AWS availability-zone, for example, and you can add any other tag you want. Tags also don't have to be tied to a host and can also relate to a specific volume, mysql index, etc...
(Note to HN, this is a feature of datadoghq - pup will gladly collect and filter on tags, but won't aggregate them, yet)
But tags aren't dimensions. Tags are merely a list of dimensionless values and completely lack context that are essential for dashboard construction and value aggregation.
Suppose I apply the tags "ord", "foo.example.com" and "bar.example.org" to a metric. How does the dashboard builder or the aggregator know what they are? They're values without the fields.
You can attach any arbitrary set of tags to metrics or events - on a per-datapoint basis, and slice / dice / alert based on those tags. Datadog will automatically tag your points by chef role or AWS availability-zone, for example, and you can add any other tag you want. Tags also don't have to be tied to a host and can also relate to a specific volume, mysql index, etc...
(Note to HN, this is a feature of datadoghq - pup will gladly collect and filter on tags, but won't aggregate them, yet)