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, in SLO History reports that include annotated SLOs, and in the Events app section under the Annotations tab.

SLO annotations can be autogenerated by Nobl9 and created by users.

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

Annotation types

Nobl9 generates annotations for the notable events happened to your SLOs. It includes annotations for budget adjustment events, data anomalies, and policy alerts. The annotations are added to the charts of the affected SLO objective.

• Data anomaly annotations are generated every time when Nobl9 detects a No data anomaly.
  The annotation covers the period from the moment a data anomaly was detected until it has been resolved.

  Actual data point timestamps vs. no data anomaly annotation duration

  No data anomaly annotations may not align exactly with the actual data point timestamps from your data source. Beyond the waiting time specified in the detection rule, this timing difference depends on the query interval and delay configured for the data source.
  For example, when query delay is configured, Nobl9 queries for data after it was initially registered in the data source. This creates a timing difference: SLO charts display data point timestamps based on what's logged in the data source, while the annotation period reflects Nobl9's anomaly detection timing, which depends on when Nobl9 receives query responses.

  

  Anomaly annotation is closed after a data stream resumes

  • Data anomaly annotations also display the ~anomaly-rule label.
    It indicates the data anomaly configuration origin:
    • Label with the manual key indicates that the data anomaly detection is configured manually by user during SLO creation or editing
    • Label with the auto key indicates the Nobl9 default configuration

• Annotations for policy alerts are created based on the metric timestamp.
  These annotations represent the time when an SLI indicates that an 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 yet resolved, you'll see a single annotation pin including only the startTime, instead of a time range.

  annotations and alert silence

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

• Annotations for budget adjustment events are generated once the adjustment event starts.
  The event duration defines the range the annotation applies to.

• User annotations refer to SLO comments added by users.
  You can comment on your SLO when significant events occur with your service, such as deployments or hotfixes.
  Annotations help answer 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 type	Visual
User comment
Budget adjustment, data anomaly
Policy alert

RBAC

• Annotation authors can edit and delete annotations they've added
• Organization admins can delete any—user and system—annotations in their organization

Useful links

Check out these related guides and references:

Global annotations listNobl9 featuresProject-level rolesNobl9 RBACOrganization-level rolesNobl9 RBACKind: AnnotationYAML guideAnnotations APIAPI referenceService level objectivesSLOs in Nobl9Overview of SLO calculationsSLO guidesAlerting in Nobl9Nobl9 featuresSLO troubleshootingTroubleshooting