We underutilize labels in Consul right now because go-metrics predates their use. Most timeseries storage and rendering systems are optimized to handle fewer metric names with more dimensions in their labels.

Any change where we're converting suffixes to labels will be breaking. Therefore we'll need to support both the current behavior and the new behavior for at least one release. This gives users a chance to convert over without having to pre-set-up their dashboards, reducing the friction of upgrading.

A mechanism inside of Consul for managing backwards compatibility with these metrics is being discussed in: #8421