Annotations

Annotations provide a way to mark points on the graph with rich events. When you pause on an annotation, you can see an event description and event tags. The text field can include links to other systems for more detail.

Native annotations

Amazon Managed Grafana comes with a native annotation store and the ability to add annotation events directly from the graph panel.

Adding annotations

To add an annotation, press Ctrl or Cmd and choose where you want to add the annotation. To make the annotation searchable from other dashboards, add tags to it.

Adding region annotations

To create an annotation for a region, press Ctrl or Cmd while you choose the region.

Built-in query

After you add an annotation, it remains visible. This is because a built-in annotation query exists on all dashboards. This annotation query fetches all annotation events that originate from the current dashboard and displays them on the panel where they were created. This includes alert state history annotations. You can stop annotations from being fetched and displayed by choosing the Dashboard settings (gear) icon, choosing Annotations, and then modifying the query named Annotations & Alerts (Built-in).

When you copy a dashboard using the Save As feature, the new dashboard has a new dashboard ID, so annotations created on the source dashboard are not visible on the copy. If the source dashboard annotations have tags to filter by, you can show the annotations on the copy by adding a new Annotation Query and filtering by the tags.

Query by tag

You can create new annotation queries that fetch annotations from the native annotation store by using the -- Grafana -- data source and setting Filter by to Tags. Specify at least one tag. For example, create an annotation query named outages, and specify a tag named outage. This query will show all annotations that you create (from any dashboard or via API) that have the outage tag.

By default, if you add multiple tags in the annotation query, Amazon Managed Grafana will show only annotations that have all the tags you supplied. To show annotations that contain at least one of the tags you supplied, turn on Match any.

In Amazon Managed Grafana, it’s possible to use template variables in the tag query. For example, if you have a dashboard showing stats for different services and a template variable that controls which services to show, you can use the same template variable in your annotation query to show annotations for only those services.

Querying other data sources

Annotation events are fetched by using annotation queries. To add a new annotation query to a dashboard, choose the Dashboard settings (gear) icon, choose Annotations, and then choose New.

Specify a name for the annotation query. This name is displayed by the check box for showing or hiding annotation events for this query. For example, you might have two annotation queries named Deploys and Outages. You can select or clear the check boxes to specify which annotations to show.

Annotation query details

The annotation query options are different for each data source.