grafana/docs/sources/alerting/fundamentals/annotation-label/labels-and-label-matchers.md

description	keywords	title	menuTitle	weight
Learn about labels and label matchers in alerting	[grafana alerting guide fundamentals]	How label matching works	Label matchers	117

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:

Operator	Description
=	Select labels that are exactly equal to the value.
!=	Select labels that are not equal to the value.
=~	Select labels that regex-match the value.
!~	Select labels that do not regex-match the value.

If you are using multiple label matchers, they are combined using the AND logical operator. This means that all matchers must match in order to link a rule to a policy.

Example scenario

If you define the following set of labels for your alert:

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

then:

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