Comments

Metric data provides insights that users can add to queries and dashboards to better understand their system, especially when investigating issues. To make sense of these metrics, users often need to consult with experts in their organization, or spend time sifting through heaps of data to identify which metrics and labels have high utility.

To provide additional context about open source metrics like Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics, use comments. This capability lets you annotate metrics with information to signify importance, help other users to understand usage context, and turn informal knowledge into institutional knowledge that can be used across your organization.

You can add comments to metrics in Telemetry Usage Analyzer. Comments, and responses to comments, persist until the comments are deleted. This behavior applies to metrics impacted by drop rules and rollup rules, and comments on metrics and labels that were removed from queries.

Comment support common Markdown formatting syntax.

View comments

Comments display as a message icon on metrics, with a number to indicate how many comments are on the metric.

To view comments:

1. In the navigation menu, click Go to Admin and then select Analyzers > Metrics Usage.
2. In the list of metrics, select the metric you want to view comments for and then click View comments.

The Comments drawer appears and shows all comments for the selected metric. From there, you can take global actions and individual actions for your comments.

Global actions

The following actions are available to all users for any comment:

• Click the message icon to reply to an existing comment.
• Click the checkmark icon to resolve a comment.
• Click the refresh icon to reopen a resolved comment.
• Click New comment to add a new comment.

Actions for your comments

The following actions are available only for comments that you added:

• Click the pencil icon to edit an existing comment.
• Click the trash can icon to delete an existing comment.

Add comments

If a metric doesn’t have any comments, you can add them. If comments were already added to a metric, you can view comments to add additional comments, or reply to existing ones.

To add comments:

1. In the navigation menu, click Go to Admin and then select Analyzers > Metrics Usage.
2. In the list of metrics, select the metric you want to view comments for and then click Add comment.
3. In the Comments drawer, enter your comment. You can use Markdown syntax to style your comment, and then click Show preview to preview view the rendered content before saving.
4. To add a chart in a comment, click the line chart icon to open a dialog that supports PromQL metrics. Enter the metric you want to include in the chart and then click Insert.
5. Click Submit to save your comment.