Annotations and Events

Creating an annotation (for the impatient)

This snippet of code will create an annotation with the tags “deployment” and “feature”, titled “New Super-duper Feature”. It’ll be timestamped at the time the event is received.

curl -X POST https://YOUR-API-KEY@api.hostedgraphite.com/api/v1/annotations/events/ -d \
"&title=New Super-duper Feature\
&tag=deployment\
&tag=feature"

Annotations

Annotations have the following properties:

• title - (required) A short summary of the annotation.

super-duper feature updated to v0.0.12

• description - A more in-depth description of the annotation.

Slow rollout of new super-duper feature: 9b562b2. Relies on old version: 4ec124b4.
Enables the new super-duper feature in production.

• tags - A single word or multiple short strings (all case-insensitive) to organise different types of events. e.g. ‘deployments’, ‘feature’, ‘test’ etc.
• start_time - Unix timestamp describing when the event occurred. If this is not specified, the time of event creation is used.
• end_time - Optional timestamp describing when the event completed. Note: We currently don’t support Grafana’s region events. As a result, end_time has no actual use in annotations.

There’s no restriction on having annotations with the same time stamps, but the combination of start time and title must be unique.

Authentication

The API uses basic HTTP authorization. An example using curl:

curl -X POST https://YOUR-API-KEY@api.hostedgraphite.com/api/v1/annotations/events/

or

curl -u 'YOUR-API-KEY:' -X POST https://api.hostedgraphite.com/api/v1/annotations/events/

Delete a single event

Deleting an annotation via the API is as simple as this:

curl -X DELETE https://YOUR-API-KEY@api.hostedgraphite.com/api/v1/annotations/events/ \
     -d '{"title": "New Super-duper Feature", "timestamp": 1431607046}'

Graphite Events

Events as per the Graphite project are fully supported. Insertion and rendering of Graphite Events works the same as the annotations endpoint, though the Graphite events API takes a JSON formatted data structure.

Create a single event

curl -X POST https://YOUR-API-KEY@api.hostedgraphite.com/api/v1/graphite/events/ \
     -d '{"what": "New Super-duper Feature", "when":1431607046, "tags":"deployment feature"}

Annotations

To support the display of Annotations, there is a function annotations() available in graphite to query and display the events. There are two options:

annotations("*")

This first option with a wildcard queries all available annotations for the time period selected

annotations("restart", "deployment")

This version queries all annotations with the tags “restart” and “deployment” for the time period selected.

Events

The graphite events function events() is also available:

drawAsInfinite(events("*")
drawAsInfinite(events("restart", "deployment")