Annotations

Annotations make it easy for you to mark milestones, describe key events in your data model, capture insights, and collaborate with your teammates. Annotations may be a single point in time or a time period. You may assign a category or label to organize your annotations by theme, by team, or by platform.

Annotations are associated with an event (or events) and a point in time or date range. Any user within a project can subscribe and add team members to an annotation. Annotation subscribers receive email notifications at any time the title or description of the annotation changes.

Examples of common annotations include:

• new releases, updates, or versions of your website or application
• marketing or advertising campaigns
• issues or constraints that impact the product or customer behavior
• changeover events such as implementing a new tracker or collector
• new events launched, modifications made to existing events, or older events deprecated
• server downtime and maintenance periods
• milestones such as a company anniversary or new hires to your technical team

Using Annotations

Access the Annotation Manager

There are three ways to access the annotation manager.

• Choose Manage Data in the main menu bar on the left of your screen, then select Annotations on the top menu bar. Annotations settings allows you to view, edit, archive, delete, or subscribe to your existing annotations, add a new annotation and manage categories.
• From any tool, select the flag dropdown in the top right corner of the chart area. This opens the in-widget annotation manager.
• From any dashboard, select +New on the top menu bar, then Annotation Widget. This creates a standalone Annotation Timeline widget, displaying annotations throughout the history of your project.

Add an Annotation

To add an annotation from the Annotations settings, select +Add Annotation at the top of the table to the left of the search bar.

To add an annotation within the in-widget annotation manager, select +New in the top right corner of the manager or click anywhere along the timeline at the bottom of the manager.

The Add an Annotation screen contains seven fields. Category and Annotation Name are required fields. Description, Select Events, Select Subscribers, Start Date, and End Date are optional fields. The optional fields will automatically populate with default contents which can be customized at your discretion.

Manage Annotations

Use categories to organize your annotations by theme, by team, by product, or by the events that are associated with the annotation. Assign a different color and label for each category.

To edit an annotation, select the flag icon in the annotation manager, then choose the pencil icon to open the Edit Annotation screen.

Hiding Annotations

Annotation Timeline Widget

The Annotation Timeline widget displays all of the annotations throughout the history of your project. It is a standalone widget displayed alongside the other widgets on a dashboard. To add an Annotation Timeline widget, select +New in the dashboard options located at the top right corner of the dashboard, then choose Annotation Widget. The Annotation Timeline widget will be created at the bottom of your dashboard. You may relocate or resize the widget just like any other dashboard widget. You may also interact with the widget to view, edit, delete, or subscribe to your existing annotations, add a new annotation and manage categories.

Please note that the widget displays only annotations attached to events that are present in queries on the dashboard.

Best Practices

• Annotation names should be brief, descriptive, and consistent
• Use categories to organize your similar annotations
• Annotations with a date range are displayed as a period of time, annotations with the same start time date and end date are displayed as a point in time