Today, Vantage announces the ability to upload labeled business metrics for calculating unit costs. Labeled business metrics enable more fine-grained unit cost reporting for a specific team, category, or business unit.
Previously, the business metrics import included only amount and date fields for each metric. However, this schema required metrics to be aggregated before they were ingested into Vantage. For example, a metric like Monthly Active Users typically applies to more than one application. Before, users had to create a separate business metric and individually set up the ingestion process for each application (e.g., Monthly Active Users - Application A, Monthly Active Users - Application B). This process made it difficult to dynamically allocate costs per application based on usage metrics. The ability to allocate these metrics is important for analyzing both overall user activity and individual application performance, enabling more informed decision-making at the application level.
Now, you can create a single business metric that includes a Label parameter to segment metric data. This label is available along with the existing date and amount parameters, for each metric they upload. The label identifies the source of the metric, for example, an associated application or cost center. When you assign a metric to a Cost Report to calculate unit costs, you can optionally select which labels are viewable on that report. All existing metric ingestion methods are supported, including the Vantage API, a CSV file, Amazon CloudWatch, or Datadog.
The Business Metrics screen in the console with imported labels
This feature is now available for all users. To get started, head to the Business Metrics screen in the console and create a new business metric. The Label parameter is available as an optional parameter on the upload. If you would like to read more about per unit costs and labeled business metrics, see the documentation.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is being launched today?
Today, Vantage is launching the ability to import time-series data as business metrics with the option to add a label for cost segmentation. These business metrics can be assigned to a Cost Report to see cost per unit across categories like application, business unit, or cost center.
2. Who is the customer?
The customer is any Vantage user who wants to visualize unit costs on a Cost Report and has source data that is grouped by a specific category, like application.
3. How much does this cost?
This feature is free to all users.
4. What are business metrics, and how do I use them?
A business metric is any source of time-series data that you want to visualize on top of cost data to understand the “cost per” a given metric. An example of a business metric is daily active users or load balancer requests per second. When you create a Cost Report that’s filtered to a specific set of costs that correlate with a business metric, you can use this visualization to understand unit costs.
5. How do I specify a metric to be imported from Datadog or CloudWatch?
When specifying the Datadog or CloudWatch metric, you can now specify a Label dimension by which to aggregate the metrics.
6. How do I specify a metric to be imported via CSV?
Using the below template, you can now optionally include a label column as part of an uploaded CSV. This column will be treated as a string and, if included, must be completed for each row.
amount,date,label
100,2024-04-01,app1
123,2024-04-01,app2
45,2024-04-02,app1
99,2024-04-02,app2
...
For more information on the required template, see the documentation.
7. How do I specify a metric to be imported via the API?
The /business_metrics endpoint now has a new label field within the values object. The value for the label field is a string.
curl --request PUT \
--url https://api.vantage.sh/v2/business_metrics/bsnss_mtrc_123456789 \
--header 'accept: application/json' \
--header 'authorization: Bearer <ACCESS_TOKEN>' \
--header 'content-type: application/json' \
--data '
{
"title": "Daily Active Users",
"values": [
{
"date": "2024-03-10",
"amount": 359,
"label": "docs.vantage.sh"
}
]
}
'
8. When adding a business metric to a Cost Report, how do I specify which label(s) to add?
On the Business Metrics screen, a new dropdown menu called Label Filter is available where you can specify which labels apply to a Cost Report. There is no limit to the number of labels you can select. Any selected labels will be aggregated and applied to the report to calculate per unit costs.
If you would like to apply these labels separately, you can add the business metric to the report several times and select a different label each time.
9. If I upload labeled data, can I still add the aggregated data to a Cost Report?
Yes, if you do not select anything for the Label Filter dropdown menu, all labels will be applied to the Cost Report.
10. What happens if I want to upload business metrics without a label?
The Label field is optional, so you can still upload business metrics without a label.
11. Can I see the labels that are present in the uploaded data?
Yes, these labels are displayed within the Imported Data table on the Business Metrics screen. All available labels are also listed in the Label Filters dropdown menu when assigning a metric to a Cost Report.
13. How are per unit costs displayed on Cost Reports?
Unit costs are displayed as a separate line on Cost Reports. You can hover over a data point to see the cost per unit for that day, week, or month. You must view a daily, weekly, or monthly view to see the cost per unit line.
A Cost Report with a per unit cost displayed on the graph
14. What’s the granularity of imported data supported?
Metrics are imported with a daily granularity.
