# How label matching works
<a name="v10-alerting-overview-labels-matching"></a>

****  
This documentation topic is designed for Grafana workspaces that support **Grafana version 10.x**.  
For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 12.x, see [Working in Grafana version 12](using-grafana-v12.md).  
For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 9.x, see [Working in Grafana version 9](using-grafana-v9.md).  
For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 8.x, see [Working in Grafana version 8](using-grafana-v8.md).

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 matcher 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
<a name="v10-alerting-overview-labels-matching-ex"></a>

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.

## Exclude labels
<a name="v10-alerting-overview-labels-matching-exclude"></a>

You can also write label matchers to exclude labels.

Here is an example that shows how to exclude the label `team`. You can choose between any of these values to exclude the label.
+ `team=""`
+ `team!~.+`
+ `team=~^$`