Prometheus discovers, scrapes, and processes different types of labeled objects. The most obvious of these objects are scrape targets and time series samples, but alerts have labels as well:

Often it is useful to be able to manipulate or filter these objects based on their label values. For example, we might want to:

• Only monitor certain targets that have a specific service discovery annotation that indicates that they should be scraped.
• Add an HTTP query parameter to the scrape request for a target.
• Only store a filtered subset of the samples scraped from a given target.
• Remove a replica label from alerts sent to the Alertmanager (so that identical alerts sent from a highly available Prometheus server pair can be deduplicated in the Alertmanager).
• Combine two label values of a scraped series into a single label (or vice versa).

Relabeling is a concept that allows the Prometheus administrator to configure these kinds of transformation and filtering rules.