---
title: "Before you add a label | Grafana Labs"
description: "Three questions to ask before adding a label to a metric"
---

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

## Before you add a label

For every label, ask:

- **Will I aggregate or filter by it?** If nobody queries by this dimension, it’s pure cost.
- **Is the value set bounded?** Think tens of values, not thousands.
- **How does it multiply?** Check the label against the labels already on the metric. Three bounded labels can still combine into thousands of series.