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Section 3 · Folder and labels

Descriptive tags that appear in every notification, the three places they come from, and why they matter.

Estimated time: 1 min

Labels

Labels for alert rules are:

  • Descriptive tags attached to each alert
  • Written as a name and a value, like severity=warning

Labels appear in your notifications so that whoever’s responding to the alert can immediately see which system, team, or environment is affected.

Label types

Labels on an alert rule come from three places:

Diagram of three label types, including user-configured, query-returned, and reserved, feeding into an alert instance that determines where notifications go
  • Added by you (user-configured), such as severity=warning
  • Added by the data source query (query-returned), such as service_name=checkout
  • Added by Grafana (reserved), such as alertname and grafana_folder

Why labels matter

Labels are a critical part of the alerting process for multiple reasons, including:

  • Notifications: Labels appear in every notification, which helps the responder identify what’s affected without opening Grafana
  • Organization: Labels help you filter and find alert rules in the rules list