Annotations provide a way to mark points on a visualization with rich events. They are visualized as vertical lines and icons on all graph panels. When you hover over an annotation, you can get event description and event tags. The text field can include links to other systems with more detail.
In the first two cases, you're creating new annotations, while in the last you're querying existing annotations from data sources. The built-in annotation query also supports this.
Annotations are supported for the following visualization types:
- Time series
- State timeline
- Candlestick
## Create annotations in panels
Grafana comes with the ability to add annotation events directly from a panel using the [built-in annotation query](#built-in-query) that exists on all dashboards. Annotations that you create this way are stored in Grafana.
In the dashboard settings, under **Annotations**, you can add new queries to fetch annotations using any data source, including the built-in data annotation data source. Annotation queries return events that can be visualized as event markers in graphs across the dashboard.
The annotation query options are different for each data source. For information about annotations in a specific data source, refer to the specific [data source](ref:data-source) topic.
After you add an annotation, they are still visible. This is due to the built-in annotation query that exists on all dashboards. This annotation query fetches all annotation events that originate from the current dashboard, which are stored in Grafana, and show them on the panel where they were created. This includes alert state history annotations.
By default, the built-in annotation query uses the `-- Grafana --` special data source, and manual annotations are only supported using this data source. You can use another data source in the built-in annotation query, but you'll only be able to create automated annotations using the query editor for that data source.
When you copy a dashboard using the **Save As** feature it gets a new dashboard id, so annotations created on the source dashboard is no longer be visible on the copy. You can still show them if you add a new **Annotation Query** and filter by tags. However, this only works if the annotations on the source dashboard had tags to filter by.
You can create new queries to fetch annotations from the built-in annotation query using the `-- Grafana --` data source by setting _Filter by_ to `Tags`.
For example, create an annotation query name `outages` and specify a tag `outage`. This query shows all annotations (from any dashboard or via API) with the `outage` tag. If multiple tags are defined in an annotation query, then Grafana only shows annotations matching all the tags. To modify the behavior, enable `Match any`, and Grafana shows annotations that contain any one of the tags you provided.
You can also use template variables in the tag query. This means if you have a dashboard showing stats for different services and a template variable that dictates which services to show, you can use the same template variable in your annotation query to only show annotations for those services.
{{<figuresrc="/media/docs/grafana/dashboards/screenshot-annotation-tag-filter-variable-10.0.png"max-width="600px"alt="Annotation query options with a template variable query tag">}}
When adding or editing an annotation, you can define a repeating time region by setting **Query type** to **Time regions**. Then, define the **From** and **To** sections with the preferred days of the week and time. You also have the option to change the timezone, which is set to the dashboard's timezone, by default.
{{<figuresrc="/media/docs/grafana/dashboards/screenshot-annotation-timeregions-10-v2.png"max-width="600px"alt="Time regions options set to business hours">}}
{{<figuresrc="/media/docs/grafana/screenshot-grafana-10-0-timeseries-time-regions.png"max-width="600px"alt="Time series visualization with time regions business hours">}}
Toggle the **Advanced** switch and use [Cron syntax](https://crontab.run/) to set more granular time region controls. The following example sets a time region of 9:00 AM, Monday to Friday:
{{<figuresrc="/media/docs/grafana/dashboards/screenshot-annotations-cron-option-v11.6.png"max-width="600px"alt="Time region query with cron syntax">}}
