It is possible to extra a datacenter out of the instance name directly using DataCenterPattern. It is also possible to query the polled mysql instance about its datacentre using DetectDataCenterQuery, but querying the server requires extra latency which may be important if monitoring a large number of servers and may be undesirable. Pushing that configuration information to the server also requires managing it on every server so it is not ideal.

You may want to group areas of your data centre together or multiple datacentres into zones which orchestrator will treat as being identical. There is currently no way in orchestrator to infer such zoning or area aggregation.

Example: if we had hosts in 2 areas named h1.area1.example.com and h2.area2.example.com where both these areas are in the same datacentre it would be good to have a lookup mechanism to allow me to merge these areas into one.

The idea here is to have something applied to the instance.Datacenter value such as: area1:dc1,area2:dc1,area3:dc2,area4:dc2,*:unkown. This list could then be applied to the area giving us the correct instance.DataCenter value. I would name such a new parameter: DataCenterLookupValues.

I will be providing a PR which provides this functionality.