Changing Grafana Legends

I’m not sure if I just can search Google properly, or this really is just not written down much, but I have had problems with Grafana Legends (I would call them the series labels). The issue is that Grafana queries Prometheus for a time series and you want to display multiple lines, but the time-series labels you get are just not quite right.

A simple example is you might be using the black-box exporter to monitor an external TCP port and you would just like the port number separate to display. The default output would look like this:

probe_duration_seconds{instance="example.net:5222",job="blackbox",module="xmpp_banner"} = 0.01
probe_duration_seconds{instance="example.net:5269",job="blackbox",module="xmpp_banner"} = 0.01

I can graph the number of seconds that it takes to probe the 5222 and 5269 TCP ports, but my graph legend is going to have the hostname, making it cluttered. I just want the legend to be the port numbers on Grafana.

The answer is to use a Prometheus function called label_replace that takes an existing label, applies a regular expression, then puts the result into another label. That’s right, regular expressions, and if you get them wrong then the label just doesn’t appear.

Perl REGEX Problems courtesy of XKCD

The label_replace documentation is a bit terse, and in my opinion, the order of parameters is messed up, but after a few goes I had what I needed:

label_replace(probe_duration_seconds{module="xmpp_banner"}, "port", "$1", "instance", ".*:(.*)")

probe_duration_seconds{instance="example.net:5222",job="blackbox",module="xmpp_banner",port="5222"}	0.001
probe_duration_seconds{instance="example.net:5269",job="blackbox",module="xmpp_banner",port="5269"}	0.002

The response now has a new label (or field if you like) called port. So what is this function to our data coming from probe_duration_seconds? The function format is:

label_replace(value, dst_label, replacement, src_label, regex)

So the function does the following:

  1. Evaluate value, which is generally some sort of query such as probe_duration_seconds
  2. Find the required source label src_label, in this example is instance, in this case the values are example.net:5222 and example.net:5269
  3. Apply regular expression regex, for us its “.*:(.*)” That says skip everying before “:” then capture/store everything past “:”. The brackets mean copy what is after the colon and put it in match #1
  4. Make a new label specified in dst_label, for us this is port
  5. Whatever is in replacement goes into dst_label. For this example it is “$1” which means match #1 in our regular expression in the label called port.

In short, the function captures everything after the colon in the instance label and puts that into a new label called port. It does this for each value that is returned into the first parameter.

This means I can use the {{port}} in my Grafana graph Legend and it will show 5222 or 5269 respectively. I have made the Legend “TCP {{port}}” to give the below result, but I could have used {{port}} in Grafana Legend and made the result “TCP $1” in the label_replace function to get the same result.

Grafana console showing the use of the label_replace function

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