Labels
Grafana Cloud RSS

Labels

Labels provide a structured way to categorize, route, and manage your integrations and alert groups. By applying labels, you can optimize response workflows, improve alert routing, and gain better visibility into service relationships.

This section explains how labels work in Grafana IRM and how to use them effectively.

About labels

Labels are key-value pairs that help you manage alert groups in Grafana IRM. They are essential for alert routing, escalation, and service organization. You can use labels to classify alert groups based on attributes such as service, team, region, or severity.

By applying meaningful labels, you can:

  • Organize and filter: Group and filter alerts based on shared characteristics (for example, service, severity, environment).
  • Route alert groups: Automatically direct alerts to the appropriate escalation chains or individuals based on their labels.
  • Manage dependencies: Define service relationships using labels to track dependencies.

Labels are configured per integration and managed in the Label Schema section of the Integration settings.

For configuration instructions, refer to Configure labels.

Types of labels

Grafana IRM supports two types of labels:

  1. Static labels: Static labels are applied to the entire integration and added to all alerts received through the integration.
  2. Dynamic labels: Extracted from the alert payload and added dynamically to alert groups.

Label behavior

  • Assignment limits: Each alert group can have up to 15 labels. If more than 15 labels are assigned, only the first 15 (sorted alphabetically) are applied.
  • Label persistence: Once a label is assigned to an alert group, it remains unchanged, even if the label is later modified. This ensures historical accuracy in alert tracking.

Labels and Service Center

The Service Center helps you define services and their dependencies. The proper use of labels in combination with the Service Center can enable service-aware alerting and dependency tracking.

  • Use the service_name label to connect alert groups to the Service Center.
  • Ensure the service_name label matches the defined service identifier to enable IRM to associate alert groups with corresponding services.

For more information, refer to the Service Center and Service Center documentation.

Labels and Upstream Dependencies

Upstream Dependencies represent services that your service relies on. Identifying these dependencies helps speed up issue resolution by highlighting the impact of related services.

Grafana IRM can inform you when an upstream service has an active alert group, indicating a potential impact on your service.

For Grafana IRM to link alert groups with upstream dependencies, the following configurations must be in place:

  • Configured service dependencies in the Service Center.
  • Defined service_name labels in your integration settings.
  • service_name label values that match the service identifiers in the Service Center.

For more information, refer to the Upstream Dependencies documentation.