Vantage Launches Flexible Match Filter Operation

Today, Vantage is launching support for Flexible Matching for Filters and Virtual Tags. Vantage customers can now use the Flexible Match filter operator to ignore casing, whitespace, underscores, and hyphenation to match all variants of a string when performing a look-up for a value.

You can now use flexible match and does not flexible match as operators in filters for Cost Reports, Segments, and Virtual Tags.

Previously, customers that had many permutations of tag values within and across cloud providers that represent the same value would have to manually aggregate these values as Virtual tags. Standardizing tag values such as “TeamA”, “team-a”, and “team_a” to a single “Team A” tag value would take 3 filter configurations. This would have to be done for every Tag Value, making it extremely manual and repetitive to replace all Tag Values from a Tag Key as a Virtual Tag, as well match any future iterations of this tag created.

Now, with the launch of the Flexible Match filter operator, customers can match strings of various case types with a single filter, eliminating the need to create separate filter configurations for different permutations of the same string. Users can use the “Flexible Match” operator to filter strings while ignoring differences in casing, whitespace, underscores, and hyphens. This can be used both in filters of various Vantage reports, such as Cost Reports or Active Resource Reports, as well as in Virtual Tag creation.

Flexible Matching for Virtual Tags and Filters is now available to all users. To get started, users can navigate to any Cost Report as well as the Tags page in the Settings section of the console. For more information on how to get started, see the Filter Cost Reports and Tagging documentation.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is being launched today?

Vantage is launching the Flexible Matching for Virtual Tags and Filters. Customers can now use the “Flexible Match” operator to filter strings while ignoring differences in casing, whitespace, underscores, and hyphens.

2. Who is the customer?

Any Vantage customer can use Flexible Matching for Filters. Only Vantage users with the “Owner” role can create Virtual Tag configurations.

3. How much does this cost?

There is no additional cost to use Flexible Matching for Virtual Tags and Filters.

4. What does the Flexible Match filter operator do?

When performing a Flexible Match for a string, Vantage will perform the following while filtering:

• Make all strings case-insensitive
• Remove whitespace
• Remove punctuations and intra-string whitespace (-_./:;\)

5. How do I create a Flexible Match filter?

When performing a filter or creating a Virtual Tag configuration, choose the “Flexible Match” operator. You can then free-form enter a text string. Vantage will perform the operations necessary to match the string to other values. You can also perform a “does not Flexible Match” to match all values that do not meet the filter criteria.

6. Where can I use Flexible Matching?

Flexible Match is available for the Tag filter field in the following areas:

• Cost Report filters
• Segment Report filters
• Virtual Tag configuration

7. Does Flexible Matching account for similar or misspelled words?

No, Flexible Match will not look for any variations in spelling. It removes only casing, whitespace, underscores, and hyphens.

8. Can I use Flexible Matching when performing a Group By on a provider tag?

No, Flexible Matching can only be used as a filter condition. If you want to match all permutations of a provider tag in a group by, it’s recommended you create a Virtual Tag.

9. Can I perform a Flexible Match using VQL?

Yes, Flexible Match is available as a new operator in VQL. You can now use:

• ~* (normalized equals)
• !~* (normalized not equals)

10. Does Vantage support Regex for Tag filtering?

This feature is intended for less-technical users to ease finding common tag nomenclature errors Vantage sees across many of its customers. We plan to support regex in the future.