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Grafana Cloud Enterprise
Last reviewed: August 26, 2026

IBM Db2 annotations

Annotations mark points in time on your dashboard panels with events or notes. The IBM Db2 data source uses the built-in Grafana SQL annotation support, so you can populate annotations from any query that runs against your IBM Db2 database.

Before you begin

Before you create annotations, ensure you have:

Create an annotation query

To create an annotation query:

  1. Open your dashboard, click Edit, then click Options (gear icon).
  2. Click Annotations in the left menu.
  3. Click Add annotation query.
  4. Enter a name for the annotation query.
  5. Click Open query editor, then select your IBM Db2 data source.
  6. Enter a SQL query that returns the required columns.
  7. Click Apply to save the annotation query.

Annotation query requirements

Grafana maps the result set to annotations by column name. Alias your columns to these names so Grafana can map them correctly:

ColumnRequiredDescription
timeYesStart time of the annotation. Must be a TIMESTAMP value.
timeendNoEnd time of the annotation. Include it to create a region annotation that spans a time range. Must be a TIMESTAMP value.
textNoText to display in the annotation.
tagsNoComma-separated tags for filtering.

Order the results by the time column so annotations render in chronological order.

Note

The time and timeend columns must be TIMESTAMP values. If your column is a DATE, the plugin converts it to a TIMESTAMP automatically. If it’s a TIME, cast it to a TIMESTAMP in the query. The IBM Db2 data source doesn’t support SQL macros such as $__timeFilter, so filter with standard Db2 SQL or template variables.

Examples

The following examples use placeholder table names. Replace them with your own schema.

Point-in-time annotation

Mark each event with a single timestamp, a description, and tags:

SQL 
SELECT
  event_time AS time,
  event_description AS text,
  event_category AS tags
FROM events
ORDER BY event_time

Region annotation

Include a timeend column to highlight a time range, such as a deployment or maintenance window:

SQL 
SELECT
  start_time AS time,
  end_time AS timeend,
  deployment_name AS text,
  'deployment' AS tags
FROM deployments
ORDER BY start_time

Filter annotations with a template variable

Use a template variable to show only the events you care about:

SQL 
SELECT
  event_time AS time,
  event_description AS text,
  event_category AS tags
FROM events
WHERE event_category = '$category'
ORDER BY event_time