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Enterprise Grafana Cloud
Last reviewed: August 24, 2026

Datadog annotations

Annotations overlay event markers on a dashboard’s graphs, so you can correlate Datadog events with your visualized data. The Datadog data source builds annotations from the Datadog event stream. The annotation editor always uses an Events query. You can’t use other query types, such as Logs or Query, as dashboard annotations.

For an introduction to annotations, refer to Annotate visualizations.

Note

The Events query type is in public preview.

Add a Datadog annotation query

To add an annotation query that uses the Datadog data source, complete the following steps:

  1. Open your dashboard and click Dashboard settings.
  2. Click Annotations.
  3. Click Add annotation query.
  4. Enter a name for the annotation.
  5. Select your Datadog data source from the Data source drop-down.
  6. Configure the query fields.
  7. Click Save dashboard.

Matching events appear as vertical markers on time-series panels. Hover over a marker to view the event title, text, and tags.

Annotation query fields

The Datadog annotation editor returns recent events from the Datadog event stream, filtered to the dashboard’s time range. Configure the following fields:

  • Sources - Enter a comma-separated list of sources to filter the events. You can include dashboard template variables.
  • Tags - Enter a comma-separated list of tags to filter the events. You can include dashboard template variables.
  • Priority - Select the priority of the events to return. Options are None, Low, or Normal. None returns events of any priority.

The annotation editor’s Priority options differ from the Events query type in the panel query editor, which uses All instead of None.

Note

Datadog annotation queries use the same event stream API as the Events query type and return a maximum of 1000 of the most recent events. The plugin doesn’t paginate additional results. For more information, refer to Event Management in the Datadog documentation.

Example: mark deployment events

To mark production deployments on your dashboard graphs, configure an annotation query that filters the event stream to deployment events:

  1. In Dashboard settings > Annotations, click Add annotation query and select your Datadog data source.
  2. In Sources, enter the source that emits your deployment events, such as github or ci.
  3. In Tags, enter env:production to limit the events to your production environment.
  4. Leave Priority set to None to return events of any priority.
  5. Click Save dashboard.

Each matching deployment event appears as a vertical marker on the dashboard’s time-series panels.