---
title: "How Metrics Drilldown organizes data | Grafana Labs"
description: "Labels and metadata structure"
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## How Grafana Metrics Drilldown organizes data

Metrics Drilldown follows the natural hierarchy of Prometheus metrics.

## The structure

| Level            | What it is                                   | Example                             |
|------------------|----------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------|
| **Metric name**  | The measurement being tracked                | `node_cpu_seconds_total`            |
| **Labels**       | Dimensions that categorize the metric        | `job`, `instance`, `mode`           |
| **Label values** | Specific values for each label               | `instance="server-01"`              |
| **Time series**  | Individual data streams matching the filters | CPU time for server-01 in user mode |

## Navigation model

Start broad and then filter down to specific time series:

1. Browse metric names
2. Select a metric to see its labels
3. Filter by label values
4. View matching time series visualizations