Labels in Nobl9

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Labels are key-value pairs that can be attached to SLOs, services, projects, and alert policies in the Nobl9 platform. Labels allow you to define attributes of resources and use them to filter and group SLOs across services and projects in the SLO Grid view, Service Health dashboard, and reports. Each label must be unique for a given SLO, but many SLOs can carry the same label.

Labels can be attached to SLOs when creating or editing a service or a project in the SLO wizard and to alerts in the alert policy wizard. You can select existing pre-defined labels or add new ones that are specific to your organization.

Requirements for labels

Labels have a specific format and must conform to the following rules:

• Labels must be in the key: value format (key=value in sloctl).

  • key can contain only lowercase letters, digits 0-9, underscores _, and hyphens -. Start with a letter. End with a letter or digit. The maximum length is 63 characters

  • value can contain Unicode characters. The maximum length is 200 characters

• Labels can contain international (diacritic) characters.

• Labels can contain digits (0-9), underscores (_) and hyphens (-) between the letters.

• There can be a maximum of 20 Labels assigned to a resource.

Most common label examples

The following are the examples for the most common labels in the Nobl9 platform:

• Area labels: area: latency, area: slowcheck.

• Geo labels: geo: apac, geo: amer, geo: eu.

• Team labels: team: green, team: sales.

• Alert policy labels: alert: low, alert: medium, alert: high.

• SLO labels: slo: ratio, slo: calendar.

• Unit labels: unit: seconds, unit: ms, unit: error per s.

• Environment (organization) labels: env: test, env: prod, env: staging.

Labels for displaying units on SLI graphs

Labels for units have the same specific format.

To display a unit on the SLI graph in the SLO details tab:

• Create or edit an SLO > SLO wizard Step 5: select or add unit labels:

  • Enter the unit key-value pair. For example, unit: ms.

  

  Image 1: Labels in step 5 of the SLO wizard

Save the changes. To view the unit you've added, go to SLO Details > SLI graph. Find the unit above the Y-axis:

Image 2: Example of unit label in the SLO Details tab

Label management

You can create labels while adding them to Nobl9 resources: SLOs, services, projects, and alert policies within their wizards. To open the wizard, do the following:

1. In the Nobl9 UI, go to the required resource list.

   • Create a new resource: click at the top of the list
   • Edit an existing resource: click in the required resource

2. Create a label:

   1. Enter the required (new) key.
   2. Click .
   3. Enter the required value.

3. Add an existing label:

   1. Select the required label in the list.

4. Remove a label from a resource:

   1. Click in the required label: .
      

      note

      You detach the entire key-value pair.
      Label detachment doesn't delete the label but unlinks it from the resource only. The label remains available for reuse with any other resource.
      Labels detached from all resources appear in the Catalog > Labels list as Unassigned to any resource.

Resource	Create or add a label
SLO	SLO wizard > Step 5: Add Name, Alert Policy and Labels > the Labels field
Project	Project wizard > the Labels field
Service	Service wizard > the Labels field
Alert policy	Alert policy wizard > Step 2: Add Alert Policy Name, Severity and Labels the Labels field

Label list

You can access all labels available for your organization under Catalog > Labels:

Image 3: Catalog > Labels

The list of labels features the following options:

• View key-value pairs along with the resources labeled with them
• Search labels by key and value
• Sort labels by key and usage
• Edit labels
  Labels with duplicate key-value pairs upon editing are merged
• Delete individual labels

Label modification

Only Organization Admins can edit and delete labels.

Once you delete a label in the Catalog > Labels list, this key-value pair is no more available.

Filtering by labels - overview

Nobl9 allows you to filter by multiple labels:

• Enter/select multiple labels with the same key to filter resources containing one of the labels with the matching key.

• Enter/select multiple labels with different keys to filter resources containing all the labels with different keys.

For example:

SLO	Label 1	Label 2
SLO A has the labels	geo: eu	team: green
SLO B has the labels	geo: apac	team: green
SLO C has the labels	geo: eu	team: red
SLO D has the labels	geo: apac	team: red

• User filters by:

  geo: eu geo: apac team: green

• Applying filters displays:

  SLO A SLO B

For more information, refer to the SLO search and filter logic document.

Retrieving labeled resources in sloctl

Retrieving SLO, Service, or a Project config also returns all the labels that are set on the objects and allows filtering them.

There are two versions of syntax accepted by sloctl while filtering by labels:

• Labels can be separated by a comma without spaces, for example:

  sloctl get slo -A -l key1=value1,key2=value2,key3=value3

• Labels can be separated by a -l with spaces in between, for example:

  sloctl get slo -A -l team=green -l team=orange -l key=value

Assumptions for Label Commands in sloctl:

• If you retrieve resources for two or more labels that have the same key, they are connected by an OR logical operator, for example:

  sloctl get slo -A -l team=green -l team=red sloctl retrieves all resources that have team=green or team=red attached to them.

• If you retrieve resources for two or more labels that have different keys, they are connected by an AND logical operator, for example:

  sloctl get slo -A -l team=green -l geo=eu sloctl retrieves all resources that have both team=green and geo=eu labels attached to them.

Useful links

SLO search and filter logic