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Configure incident labels

Incident labels in Grafana IRM provide a powerful way to annotate, categorize, and filter incidents. By applying labels to incidents, you can track trends, analyze incident patterns, and improve your overall response process.

Labels are now shared across multiple Grafana products providing a unified experience for monitoring and incident response. Labels are structured as key-value pairs (for example, team_name:incident or service_name:mimir), allowing for more detailed and flexible categorization.

Why use incident labels?

  • Improve organization: Categorize incidents by squad, service, region, or other important criteria.
  • Enhance querying: Filter and query incidents across Grafana products using consistent labels.
  • Unify workflows: Correlate incidents with alerts and SLOs using shared labels.
  • Automate responses: Trigger actions through custom webhooks based on label criteria.

Add incident labels

You can create labels to match your organization’s needs, whether by team, service, priority, or other criteria.

  1. In the Grafana Cloud main menu, go to IRM > Settings.
  2. Select the Incidents tab.
  3. Scroll to the Labels section.
  4. Click + Add new label.
  5. Provide the following information:
    • Key-value pair: For example, team_name: infrastructure.
    • Description: Optionally, describe the purpose of the label to help your team apply it consistently.
    • Color: Optionally, assign a color from the hue wheel or use the default color.
  6. Click Add to create the label.
  7. Repeat steps 3-6 as needed to create additional labels.

Edit incident labels

You can update existing labels to better align with your organization’s needs.

  1. In the Grafana Cloud main menu, go to IRM > Settings.
  2. Select the Incidents tab.
  3. Scroll to the Labels section.
  4. Click the pencil icon next to the label you want to edit.
  5. Modify the key-value pair, Description, or Color as needed.
  6. Click Update to save your changes.

Apply labels to incidents

You can apply labels to both active and resolved incidents using the + Add Label option in the incident card. Labels are displayed as key-value pairs, such as squad:incident or service_name:mimir.

Example use cases

  • Filter dashboards: Use consistent labels across Incident, OnCall, and SLO to filter Grafana SLO dashboards by incidents sharing the same service_name label.
  • Targeted notifications: Automatically notify the correct team by labeling an active incident with a specific squad.
  • Automated actions: Trigger custom webhooks when an incident matches specific labels, such as a particular cluster or namespace.

Best practices

  • Use clear, consistent keys when defining labels (for example, service_name or squad).
  • Avoid overly generic labels. Instead, use key-value pairs that provide meaningful context (for example, service_name:mimir instead of just mimir).
  • Establish a consistent naming convention across your organization for better collaboration and reporting.