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Grafana Cloud Enterprise Open source

How label matching works

Use labels and label matchers to link alert rules to notification policies and silences. This allows for a very flexible way to manage your alert instances, specify which policy should handle them, and which alerts to silence.

A label matchers consists of 3 distinct parts, the label, the value and the operator.

  • The Label field is the name of the label to match. It must exactly match the label name.

  • The Value field matches against the corresponding value for the specified Label name. How it matches depends on the Operator value.

  • The Operator field is the operator to match against the label value. The available operators are:

OperatorDescription
=Select labels that are exactly equal to the value.
!=Select labels that are not equal to the value.
=~Select labels that regex-match the value.
!~Select labels that do not regex-match the value.

If you are using multiple label matchers, they are combined using the AND logical operator. This means that all matchers must match in order to link a rule to a policy.

Example scenario

If you define the following set of labels for your alert:

{ foo=bar, baz=qux, id=12 }

then:

  • A label matcher defined as foo=bar matches this alert rule.
  • A label matcher defined as foo!=bar does not match this alert rule.
  • A label matcher defined as id=~[0-9]+ matches this alert rule.
  • A label matcher defined as baz!~[0-9]+ matches this alert rule.
  • Two label matchers defined as foo=bar and id=~[0-9]+ match this alert rule.