--- title: Annotations description: Correlate metric changes on your APM charts with the deployments and events that caused them. url: https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm-v2/features/annotations/ product: apm feature: APM Overview feature_id: apm-general feature_identifier: apm/apm-general last_updated: '2026-10-21' --- # Annotations Annotations overlay deployments, alerts, feature-flag changes, campaigns, and configuration changes on your APM charts, so you can line a latency spike or error surge up with the change that caused it. Every dated change sits on the same timeline as your metrics, so you can answer "what changed?" on the chart itself, without switching tools. Use it to: * **Confirm whether a deploy caused a regression**: Line a deployment annotation up with the moment error rate or latency shifted to see whether the release is the culprit. * **Rule a config change in or out**: Check whether a configuration-change annotation sits at the start of a spike before you look elsewhere for the trigger. * **Correlate a campaign with a traffic surge**: Overlay campaign annotations on throughput to see which push drove the extra load. ## What you need * Access to APM and the service you want to analyze. * Events ingested through the Coralogix ops-events ingest API - these appear as annotations on your charts. See [Send events to Coralogix](#send-events-to-coralogix). ## Turn on annotations Annotations appear on the overview charts in the catalog and on the charts in an entity drilldown. One **Annotations** control on the toolbar turns them on for all the charts on the screen; open it to show them. The first time, a short introduction (**Annotations on your charts**) explains the layer - select **Got it** to dismiss it. When annotations are on, the control carries a **Reported** badge, and the setting persists across sessions. The Annotations panel has two settings: * **Annotation types to show**: select which types appear - **Deployments** and **Custom events** (alerts, feature flags, campaigns, and configuration changes). Select at least one type; with none selected, the panel reads **No types selected** and no annotations draw. * **Which events to show**: set the scope - **Service events**, **Service and related events**, or **All events** (see [Select which events appear](#select-which-events-appear)). Annotations follow the current time range and filters. [![The Annotations control on the chart toolbar, with the annotation types to show and the scope of events to show.](/docs/assets/images/annotations-2722a83be5302840cae2cff74f756a8b.webp)](https://coralogix.com/docs/assets/images/annotations-2722a83be5302840cae2cff74f756a8b.webp) Annotations appear as vertical lines across the charts, aligned to event timestamps. Hover an annotation to see its details - the event's exact date and time, the source system, the event description, and the service and environment it applies to - and to open its actions. The tooltip header shows the time of the hovered data point, which can differ from the event's own time. These include **Explore Logs** to jump to the logs around that event and, for deployment events, **Open pipeline run**, **Open repository**, **Open in** the source system, and **Copy commit SHA**, **Copy pipeline name**, or **Copy branch/tag name**. When several events fall in the same time bucket, the hover shows one with a count (**N events at this time**) and a **+N more** line; Cmd/Ctrl-click to pin the tooltip and read the full list. [![An annotation tooltip reading 4 events at this time, with a deployment event and its environment, a +3 more line, and the hint to select for actions or Cmd-click to pin.](/docs/assets/images/annotations-tooltip-d3af064dc8a1db41e38642cc2ea8e18e.webp)](https://coralogix.com/docs/assets/images/annotations-tooltip-d3af064dc8a1db41e38642cc2ea8e18e.webp) ## Select which events appear In the Annotations panel, **Which events to show** sets the scope: * **Service events**: annotations linked to the service you're analyzing. * **Service and related events**: annotations linked to this service and its related services. See [Related services](#related-services). * **All events**: every annotation in your account. Events without a `service.name` - for example, account-wide incidents, marketing campaigns, or feature-flag changes - appear only in this scope, alongside every service's deployment events. ## Annotation types on the chart On the chart, Coralogix draws each annotation type in its own color, with a matching dashed entry in the chart legend. Deployments sent as `cdEvent` are grouped together, and custom events sent as `customEvent` form their own group. Only types with events in the current time range appear. Use **Annotation types to show** in the Annotations panel to pick which types draw. ## Send events to Coralogix Annotations come from the Coralogix ops-events ingest API. For the endpoints, authentication, the full field reference, and the per-platform CI/CD guides, see [Send events to Coralogix](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/monitoring-and-insights/annotations.md#send-events-to-coralogix) in the Annotations guide. ## Related services A related service is a service that sends requests to the current service or receives requests from it. Coralogix derives the set from the [Service map](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm-v2/features/service-map.md). When you select **Service and related events**, the scope includes: * The current service: the service you're analyzing. * Every service in that service's Service map neighborhood. This scope shows a ***n* services** button that opens those related services in the [Service map](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm-v2/features/service-map.md). ## Limitations * Annotations support two event kinds today: `cdEvent` for continuous-delivery events (with pipeline and VCS metadata) and `customEvent` for generic events. Both appear on charts; only `cdEvent` carries the CD-specific fields. More structured kinds are added over time. ## Related resources * [Annotations](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/monitoring-and-insights/annotations.md): how annotations work across APM, Explore, and Custom Dashboards. * [Service map](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm-v2/features/service-map.md): how Coralogix builds the service dependency graph that defines related services. * [Group by service version](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm/features/group-by-service-version.md): compare metrics across the deployments an annotation represents. * [OpenTelemetry CI/CD semantic conventions](https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/semconv/registry/attributes/cicd/): the OTel conventions that inspired the `cdEvent` field names. ## Next steps Monitor your AWS Lambda functions in [Serverless monitoring](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm/features/serverless-monitoring.md).