SLO annotations

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SLO annotations are the notes added to your SLO charts when an outstanding event related to the monitored resource occurs.

You can find SLO annotations on SLO charts and in SLO History reports that include annotated SLOs.

SLO annotations can be created by users (user annotations) and Nobl9 (system annotations). System annotations relate to budget adjustment and alert events.

You can manage SLO annotations using the Nobl9 Web interface, sloctl, or Nobl9 API.

System annotations

For each alerting or budget adjustment event in an SLO, Nobl9 adds an annotation to the affected SLO objective chart. Such annotation is displayed as a time range with startTime representing the timestamp of the event start and endTime representing the timestamp of the event resolution or cancel.

System annotations include the following details:

• Time of annotation creation
• Period of event duration

Additional information depends on event and is as follows:

• Alert event:
  • Alert policy and condition
  • Affected objective name
  • Alert ID
• Budget adjustment event:
  • Budget adjustment display name (or its name when a display name is missing)
  • The name of the objective with budget adjusted
  • First budget adjustment start date and budget adjustment duration
  • Recurrence rule, if defined

System annotations for alerts are created based on metric timestamp. These annotations represent the time when an SLI indicates that alert was triggered or resolved. For delayed metrics, annotations added by the system relate to a past period; however, the notifications are sent when the alerts are triggered.

If an alert is triggered but not resolved yet, you can only see one annotation pin including only the startTime, not a time range.

annotations and alert silence

System annotations are created regardless of whether an alert is silenced—Nobl9 creates an annotations for silenced alerts and displays them on the SLO charts.

User annotations

User annotations are added manually by users and include the following details:

• The first and last name of the user who added the annotation
• The date and time of the annotation creation
• The period the annotation relates to
• A custom description—anything the user considered necessary to note

You can annotate your SLO in the case of any outstanding event happened with your service or when any deployments or hotfixes take place.

The point of annotations is answering to the questions like:

• What caused my error budget to burn so quickly?
• Why did my SLI spike?
• When and how long was my service down?

Annotation visuals

Annotation origin is indicated by its icon. Annotations that share the same start date but have different start times are grouped. Annotations with identical start dates and times (up to the second) are treated as a single annotation.

Annotation origin	Visual (single)	Visual (grouped)
User
System, budget adjustment
System, alert event

RBAC

The following are the RBAC limitations for system annotations:

• You can't edit system annotations.
• Only Organization admins can delete system annotations, for example, when a false alert was triggered.
• Users with other permissions can only view system annotations.