grafana/docs/sources/alerting/fundamentals/annotation-label/how-to-use-labels.md

aliases	description	keywords	title	weight
/docs/grafana/latest/alerting/fundamentals/annotation-label/how-to-use-labels/	Learn about labels and label matchers in alerting	grafana alerting guide fundamentals	Labels in Grafana Alerting	117

Labels in Grafana Alerting

This topic explains why labels are a fundamental component of alerting.

• The complete set of labels for an alert is what uniquely identifies an alert within Grafana alerts.
• The Alertmanager uses labels to match alerts for [silences]({{< relref "../../silences/" >}}) and [alert groups]({{< relref "../../alert-groups/" >}}) in [notification policies]({{< relref "../../notifications/" >}}).
• The alerting UI shows labels for every alert instance generated during evaluation of that rule.
• Contact points can access labels to dynamically generate notifications that contain information specific to the alert that is resulting in a notification.
• You can add labels to an [alerting rule]({{< relref "../../alerting-rules/" >}}). Labels are manually configurable, use template functions, and can reference other labels. Labels added to an alerting rule take precedence in the event of a collision between labels (except in the case of Grafana reserved labels).

{{< figure src="/static/img/docs/alerting/unified/rule-edit-details-8-0.png" max-width="550px" caption="Alert details" >}}

Grafana reserved labels

Note: Labels prefixed with grafana_ are reserved by Grafana for special use. If a manually configured label is added beginning with grafana_ it may be overwritten in case of collision.

Grafana reserved labels can be used in the same way as manually configured labels. The current list of available reserved labels are:

Label	Description
grafana_folder	Title of the folder containing the alert.