Grafana Annotations

Correlate incidents with deployments and config changes from any source. OpenSRE reads Grafana annotations — the standard, source-agnostic “what changed and when” marker — so the agent can answer “did a deploy or config change precede this alert?” even when the change did not come from a GitHub push (ArgoCD/Flux syncs, helm upgrade, Jenkins/CircleCI jobs, Terraform applies, manual hotfixes). This complements the GitHub deploy timeline, which only sees GitHub-originated deploys.

Requirements

No new setup or credentials — it reuses your existing Grafana integration. If Grafana is connected (see Grafana), the annotations tool is available automatically during investigations.

Parameters

Parameter	Description
`from`	ISO 8601 window start (e.g. `2026-05-30T14:00:00Z`). Overrides the default.
`to`	ISO 8601 window end. Overrides the default.
`tags`	Optional list of annotation tags to filter by (e.g. `["deployment"]`).
`time_range_minutes`	Window size when `from`/`to` are omitted (default `60`, ending now).
`limit`	Maximum annotations to return (default `100`).

Example

query_grafana_annotations(from="2026-05-30T14:00:00Z", to="2026-05-30T15:00:00Z", tags=["deployment"])

{
  "source": "grafana_annotations",
  "total": 1,
  "annotations": [
    {
      "time": "2026-05-30T14:41:09Z",
      "time_end": null,
      "text": "deploy checkout-api v2.8.1",
      "tags": ["deployment", "checkout-api"],
      "dashboard_uid": null
    }
  ]
}

Each annotation also carries time_end (set only for region annotations) and dashboard_uid (set only when the annotation is attached to a dashboard); both are null otherwise. The agent uses results like this to flag a likely change-induced regression and tie the suspected root cause to a specific deploy.

Emitting annotations

Make your deploys visible by writing a Grafana annotation when you ship. Most CD tools can post to Grafana’s annotations API, for example:

curl -s -X POST "$GRAFANA_URL/api/annotations" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $GRAFANA_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"time": 1717079669000, "text": "deploy checkout-api v2.8.1", "tags": ["deployment", "checkout-api"]}'

Tagging deploy annotations consistently (e.g. deployment) lets the agent filter precisely during an investigation.

Grafana groundcover

Overview

LLM providers

Observability and incidents

Cloud, code, and collaboration

Messaging

Data and workflow systems

Requirements

Parameters

Example

Emitting annotations

​Requirements

​Parameters

​Example

​Emitting annotations

Requirements

Parameters

Example

Emitting annotations