Announcement
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Annotations now show up on your dashboards
The context you attach to a report follows it onto every dashboard widget. Report annotations now render directly on dashboard widgets.
A spike on a cost chart is only half the story. The other half is what happened that day: a warehouse migration, a traffic event, a committed-use purchase kicking in. Annotations in Cloud Intelligence™ let you pin that context to the chart, but until now they only rendered inside the open report. The moment a report landed on a dashboard, the explanation disappeared, and dashboards are exactly where most people glance at these charts. So the person reviewing spend saw the spike, pinged the person who annotated it, and got back a link to the same report they were already looking at.
What you get
Any annotation on a report, whether you added it from the Annotations page, from the report itself, or straight from a cost anomaly, now appears as a marker on that report's dashboard widget. Hover over a marker to read the message; select it to keep the details open, including any link you attached. Annotations scoped to all reports show up on every widget they apply to. There is nothing to configure: existing annotations appear on your dashboards as of today.
Creating annotations works the same as before. Anyone with Cloud Analytics Admin permission can add one, with a date, a message, an optional label, and an optional URL, and scope it to one report or to all of them. The annotations guide covers the details.
Get started
- Create an annotation on a report, or scope it to all reports.
- Add the report to a dashboard, if it isn't there already.
- Open the dashboard. The annotation marker appears on the widget's chart, right where it appears in the report.
Dashboard annotations are available now to all Cloud Intelligence™ customers. If your team keeps a running log of infrastructure changes somewhere else, try annotating the next one instead and see whether the questions about "what happened here" stop reaching you. Tell us how it holds up on your real dashboards.
