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Documentation Grafana documentation Alerting Alerting fundamentals Annotations and labels for alerting rules Label 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.