---
title: "Create rules and exemptions | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn how to create aggregation rules and exemptions to control which metrics are aggregated and which are preserved."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Create rules and exemptions

When automated suggestions aren’t a perfect fit or you want to be more proactive, you can move from accepting recommendations using **Auto-apply**, to defining your own logic.

1. Navigate to **Adaptive Metrics** > **Metrics**.

On the **Metrics** tab, select a segment from the dropdown menu that does not have **Auto-apply** enabled.

Click **Add new rule** to create a custom aggregation or drop rule.

Choose the rule type:

- **Aggregation** — to combine similar series and reduce cardinality.
- **Drop** — to stop collecting redundant metrics.

Define what the rule targets: enter the metric name or pattern, and select which labels to keep when aggregating (for example, `job`, `instance`).

Configure your rule settings in the dialog, then click **Save** to save your rule.

## Create exemptions

Create exemptions to prevent certain metrics or labels from being included in recommendations.

1. Navigate to **Adaptive Metrics** > **Configuration**.

Click **Add new exemption**.

From the **Metric** dropdown, select a metric from the list or toggle the **All** switch to apply this exemption to all metrics.

Choose how the metric name should be matched: **Exact** for a single metric name, **Prefix** to match every metric whose name starts with the value you entered, or **Suffix** to match every metric whose name ends with it.

From the **Keep labels** dropdown, select one or more labels you do not want to be aggregated, or toggle **All** to keep all labels.

(Optional) Select **Disable recommendations** to stop Adaptive Metrics from generating new recommendations for the matched metrics. Use this when you want exempted metrics to be left untouched entirely.

Click **Save** to create the exemption.