Today, Vantage is launching Nested Tag Drill Down in Cost Reports, enabling customers to quickly explore hierarchical Virtual Tags directly from within their reports. Vantage now automatically detects hierarchical relationships between Virtual Tags and surfaces the ability to drill down into any tag’s hierarchy within Cost Reports.

Customers use Virtual Tags to apply consistent tagging across providers, standardize naming conventions, and align cloud costs to their internal taxonomies. For organizations with nested tagging structures, such as a “Team” tag containing multiple “Product” tags, drilling down into the next level of detail previously required manual filter adjustments and incumbent knowledge of how tags were related to each other. This slowed down cost analysis and made it harder to move seamlessly from one level of tagging to another.

With Nested Tag Drill Down, Vantage automatically detects hierarchical relationships between Virtual Tags and surfaces a one-click link to explore the next level. When viewing a Virtual Tag in a Cost Report, a drill-down icon appears if the tag has nested values. Clicking the icon reveals all child Virtual Tags in the hierarchy. This allows customers to filter by a specific key and instantly regroup their report. For example, a Virtual Tag for Team A is defined by four underlying Product tags. From a Cost Report grouped by Team A, a user can click the drill-down icon, choose Product, and instantly see costs broken out by the four products that make up Team A. This dramatically reduces the time to navigate between cost views and makes hierarchical cost exploration effortless.

Nested Tag Drill Down is available to all Vantage customers today. To try it, open any Cost Report grouped by a hierarchical Virtual Tag, and click the drill-down icon next to a tag value. For more information, see the Cost Reports documentation.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is being launched today?

Vantage is launching Nested Tag Drill Down in Cost Reports, allowing customers to quickly filter and regroup their report by the next level in a Virtual Tag hierarchy directly from a tag value.

2. Who is the customer?

Any Vantage customer using Virtual Tags in Cost Reports, especially those with hierarchical or nested tagging structures.

3. How much does this cost?

There is no additional cost to use Nested Tag Drill Down.

4. How does it work?

When viewing a Virtual Tag in a Cost Report, Vantage detects if a Virtual Tag being viewed contains nested Virtual Tags below it in a hierarchy. If so, a drill-down icon will appear next to the tag value. Clicking this icon opens a dropdown of all tag keys beneath it. Selecting one applies a filter for the tag that was drilled into, and groups the report by the selected nested tag key.

5. How do I create a Virtual Tag that references a Virtual Tag?

When defining a Virtual Tag, once you have chosen a provider, select “Tag” as your filter value. From here, you can choose any provider or Virtual Tag key. Virtual Tags will be represented by a pink tag icon, with the Vantage logo. See the documentation for details.

6. What is an example use case?

A company uses a “Team” tag, where each team has multiple “Product” tags. By clicking the drill-down icon on a “Team” value, the user can instantly filter the report to that team’s costs and group by “Product” without manually editing filters.

7. Does this work with both Provider Tags and Virtual Tags?

Detection of Tag hierarchies of nested tags is only compatible with Vantage Virtual Tags. You can use the default drill down experience to drill into specific tag keys.

8. Do I need to configure anything to enable this?

No. If you already have nested Virtual Tags, drill down will appear automatically in your Cost Reports.

9. What happens if a tag has no hierarchy?

If the tag is not hierarchical, no drill down icon will be displayed.

10. Can I reference any existing Virtual Tag when creating a new Virtual Tag?

At this time, you cannot use Virtual Tag keys that use any form of cost allocation (i.e., cost-based allocation or business metric-based allocation).

11. Does a Virtual Tag need to be fully processed before it can be used in a Nested Virtual Tag?

No, once a Virtual Tag is created, it is immediately available for selection in tag filters.

12. Can I create a Virtual Tag that references itself?

No. You’ll get an error; cyclical references aren’t allowed.