Request Attribute - leveraged to split by Supported Host

[ChadTurner]

I'm running out of clever ways to solve this and was hoping the community minds might have a solution. 

The ask - We need to be able to split out service traces that are served up by a subset of hosts.  This also needs to be 'tileable' in Classic Dashboards as we are not fully into RUM in Grail, so notebooks and New Dashboards will not be viable. 

Overall Details - As mentioned we have a Service called "X" that runs on 4 Hosts, that is part of a Process Group. The teams want to see the response time and metric data as it relates to the traces from Service X, and split it by Host 1, Host 2, Host 3, Host 4. 

This ability to split by, or filter on, the given host isn't an option in the old data explorer: 

Now I have tried to leverage filtering by way of a tag, being a host tag in particular, however, its the service, so that tag results in all the 4 hosts in a single tag, which were not able to isolate out. 

So we then looked to the traces, The traces build those metrics for the services, so lets go to the source. That comes in at the MDA level or even at the distributed traces level. 

As you can see in the MDA, I can easily split it by, or even filter by the instance name which includes the primary supported host. 

But since we are splitting or filtering on "instance" it wont allow us to create a metric due to imposed limitations. 
Yes, as mentioned I could go over to the new views and filter all this data and make it a tile, but my RUM is not in grail yet: 

So going back to the MDA, we cant tile that, we cant make it a metric based off the instance as a filter or a split by... but, we could make a metric based off the Request Attribute being leveraged as the filter. The only problem is, how Do I extract that out of the Trace overall, and link the value as a RA? 

Here is a trace, and in topology we see the supporting host: 

Any clever ideas would be greatly appreciated 🙂 

[Mohamed_Hamdy · Accepted solution]

Hi @ChadTurner ,

You can still create a metric using {Service:Instance}. While it’s true that this option isn’t available directly through the MDA interface, you can work around it by removing the dimension from MDA, then going to the Advanced Options and manually adding it as a dimension. It will be accepted.

However, please note that the result will be displayed as the instance ID, not the instance name.

[ChadTurner]

@Mohamed_Hamdy Thank you for this clever work around!