Annotations overlay events on time-series charts so you can see what happened alongside your metrics. If a chart shows a latency spike, an annotation might show that a pod restarted or a container got rescheduled seconds before, right there on the same chart.

Prerequisites

Annotations display log events already ingested into Dash0. In OpenTelemetry, a log event is any log record that carries an event.name attribute (or the event.auto.event.name fallback). Make sure at least one source of log events is active:

Service Events: Log events that also carry a service.name attribute, together with, optionally, a service.namespace attribute. These can overlap with Kubernetes Events and other log events.
Kubernetes Events: The Dash0 Kubernetes operator (v0.92.1+) automatically collects Kubernetes events from monitored namespaces and ingests them as log events.
Structured Log Sources: Any structured log record with an otel.event.name attribute is a log event. You can also create log events directly from the Dash0 CLI.

Add Annotations to a Panel

Open a dashboard and click Edit on the panel you want to annotate.
Below the query editor, next to the Query tab, click +, and then select Add Annotation.

Tip

When annotations are active, a secondary timeline appears at the top of the panel. Each mark represents a matching log event; hovering over a mark reveals the event details. You can add multiple annotations per panel to layer different event scopes on the same chart.

Select an Annotation type to filter which log events are shown, Service Events, Kubernetes Events, or Log Events. For Service Events, select a Service to scope the annotation to.
Optionally click + Add filter to narrow results by attributes such as event reason, severity, or resource name.
The annotation markers appear immediately on the chart preview.
Save the panel to persist the annotation for all dashboard viewers.

You can add multiple annotations to a single panel, each tracking a different event type or service.

View Event Details

Events appear as markers along the chart timeline. When multiple events occur within a short time window, they are grouped into a single indicator that shows the total event count.

Click on any marker to expand a detail panel that lists:

The time range of the grouped events
Event categories and their counts
Individual events with timestamp and description
A link to view remaining items if the list is truncated