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Enterprise Grafana Cloud
Last reviewed: March 30, 2026

New Relic annotations

Annotations overlay event markers on your Grafana dashboard graphs, helping you correlate changes and incidents with metric data. The New Relic data source supports three annotation query types: Deployments, Alerts, and Insights.

Before you begin

Create an annotation query

To add a New Relic annotation to your dashboard:

  1. Navigate to your dashboard and click Dashboard settings (gear icon).
  2. Click Annotations in the left-side menu.
  3. Click Add annotation query.
  4. Select the New Relic data source.
  5. Choose a Query Type and configure the fields.
  6. Click Apply.

Query types

The annotation editor supports the following query types.

Deployments

The Deployments query type overlays application deployment markers on your graphs.

FieldDescription
Application IDThe New Relic application ID. You can use a template variable, for example $app.

Alerts

The Alerts query type overlays New Relic alert events on your graphs. You can filter by product, event type, entity type, and entity ID.

FieldDescription
Product(Optional) Filter by New Relic product. Options: APM, BROWSER, MOBILE, SERVERS, PLUGINS, SYNTHETICS, ALERTS.
Event Type(Optional) Filter by alert event type. Options: NOTIFICATION, DEPLOYMENT, VIOLATION_OPEN, VIOLATION_CLOSE, VIOLATION, INSTRUMENTATION.
Entity Type(Optional) Filter by entity type. Options: Application, Server, KeyTransaction, Plugin, MobileApplication, BrowserApplication, Monitor, Host.
Entity ID(Optional) Filter by a specific entity ID. You can use a template variable, for example $app or $server.

Insights

The Insights query type lets you use a raw NRQL query to generate annotation events. This provides the most flexibility for custom annotation data.

Enter your NRQL query in the query editor. The $__timeFilter macro is supported.

Mark a deployment event:

SQL 
SELECT timestamp, description FROM NrAuditEvent WHERE actionIdentifier = 'dashboard.update' $__timeFilter

Annotate application error spikes:

SQL 
SELECT count(*) FROM TransactionError WHERE appName = 'my-app' $__timeFilter TIMESERIES

Show Synthetics monitor failures:

SQL 
SELECT timestamp, monitorName, result FROM SyntheticCheck WHERE result = 'FAILED' $__timeFilter

Display configuration changes:

SQL 
SELECT timestamp, actionIdentifier, actorEmail FROM NrAuditEvent $__timeFilter

Next steps