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DocumentationGrafana documentationAlertingAlerting fundamentalsAnnotations and labels for alerting rulesLabel matchers

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:

Example of a label matcher

Imagine we’ve defined the following set of labels for our alert.

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

In this situation,

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