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Exploring annotations

Annotations in Grafana highlight key events on your dashboards. They encompass three core elements:

  • Native annotations
  • Alerts
  • Annotation queries

The following diagram compares them:

Comparing annotations, alerts, and annotation queries in Grafana.

Note

Native annotations and alerts are stored as records in the Grafana configuration database, while annotation queries are custom requests to fetch and display them on your dashboard.

Annotation queries

Annotation queries come in two flavors:

  • Built-in: Basic functionality out of the box.
  • User-defined: Flexible queries that can tap into any database—or even Grafana storage with the Business Satellite data source.

Refer to the dataflow schema below for detail:

Dataflow of annotations, alerts, and annotation queries.

Despite their names, native annotations and alerts share many underlying similarities. With the Business Satellite data source, you can manage both seamlessly.

Business Satellite

The Business Satellite data source helps tackle a real-world production challenge. It lets you pull native annotations and alerts from local or remote Grafana instances, with flexible filtering options.

Visualizing built-in and user-defined annotation queries on a time-series graph.