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Grafana Cloud Enterprise Open source
Last reviewed: June 8, 2026

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus annotations

Annotations overlay event markers on dashboard graphs so you can correlate metrics with events such as deployments or incidents. The Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus data source supports annotations driven by PromQL queries, the same as the core Grafana Prometheus data source.

Before you begin

Before you add annotations, ensure you have:

Add an annotation query

To add an annotation query to a dashboard:

  1. Navigate to Dashboard settings > Annotations.
  2. Click Add annotation query.
  3. Enter a name for the annotation.
  4. Select the Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus data source.
  5. Enter a PromQL query in the code query field. Any series the query returns becomes an annotation marker.
  6. Configure the field mappings, then click Apply.

Map query results to annotation fields

Use the following options to control how Grafana builds each annotation from the query results.

FieldDescription
Min stepThe lower bound for the query step, which controls how often Grafana samples the series.
TitleA template for the annotation title. Reference labels with the {{label_name}} syntax.
TagsA template for the annotation tags, populated from series labels.
TextA template for the annotation description. Reference labels with the {{label_name}} syntax.
Series value as timestampWhen enabled, Grafana interprets the series value as a Unix timestamp in seconds and places the annotation at that time instead of at the data point’s own time.

Annotation query examples

The following examples show common annotation queries. After you enter a query, use the Title, Text, and Tags fields to format each marker from the series labels.

To create an annotation each time a Prometheus alert fires, query the built-in ALERTS metric:

promql 
ALERTS{alertstate="firing"}

Set the Title to {{alertname}} and the Text to {{alertstate}} so each marker shows the alert name and state.

To mark when a monitored target goes down, query for targets that report as down:

promql 
up == 0

Set the Title to {{job}} down and add {{instance}} to the Tags field.

To mark host reboots, query for changes in the node boot time within each step:

promql 
changes(node_boot_time_seconds[$__interval]) > 0

To place annotations from a metric that stores an event time as its value, such as a deployment timestamp, enable Series value as timestamp:

promql 
deployment_timestamp_seconds