Streamline Your Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring with Custom Labels
Custom labels are a game changer in Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring. They help you organize telemetry and define policies, streamlining alerting, attribution, and access control. The recent updates mean that custom labels are no longer confined to the sm_check_info metric; they now attach directly to every check metric and log. This consistency across Grafana Cloud simplifies your workflows significantly.
Previously, custom labels were prefixed with 'label_', which added unnecessary complexity. With the new update, that prefix is removed, and your labels appear exactly as you define them. This eliminates the 'join tax' that required you to join metadata against metrics just to filter a dashboard or scope an alert. The migration process is straightforward, consisting of three stages to transition from the prefixed label state to the new setup.
In production, you need to be aware that admin access is required to perform the migration steps. The migration does not increase cardinality or cost, and historical data remains intact and queryable. However, you must complete the migration by March 1, 2027, to avoid breaking your custom dashboards, SLOs, alerts, and queries that reference Synthetic Monitoring metrics. After this date, support for the legacy prefixed behavior will be discontinued.
Key takeaways
- →Understand that custom labels now attach directly to every check metric and log.
- →Remove the 'label_' prefix to simplify your observability setup.
- →Complete the migration by March 1, 2027, to avoid breaking existing configurations.
- →Leverage the streamlined alerting and attribution capabilities with custom labels.
Why it matters
This update enhances your observability stack by reducing complexity and improving the efficiency of your monitoring workflows. It allows for faster filtering and alerting, which is crucial in a production environment.
When NOT to use this
The official docs don't call out specific anti-patterns here. Use your judgment based on your scale and requirements.
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