Annotations, Mark Deploys and Changes on Your Response Time Chart

Mark what changed, right on the graph

Add an annotation for a deploy, a config change or a migration, and it appears on your response time chart at that exact minute. The next time the line moves, the reason is already sitting beside it.

A chart shows you when. An annotation tells you why.

Put cause and effect side by side

A jump from 1,700 ms to 2,900 ms is just a number until you know what happened at a quarter past eleven. With the deploy marked on the chart, the question mostly answers itself before anyone opens a terminal.

See whether the fix actually worked

Mark the change, then mark the rollback. What sits between the two markers is the evidence: how long the regression really lasted, whether the revert landed, and what normal looked like before any of it started.

Still make sense six months later

Nobody remembers why response times stepped up last spring. The annotation does, along with whatever you wrote in the description: the reason, the ticket, the link to the release.

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How do annotations work?

Three fields and a few seconds. Nothing to install, and nothing to change on your website.

Open the response time chart on any monitor and start a new annotation.

Set the date and time, give it a short title, and add details if they help.

It shows on the chart at that exact moment, across every monitoring location.

What teams put on the chart

Anything that might explain a change in the line, whether it came from you or from somebody else.

Deploys and releases

The obvious one, and the one that pays for itself fastest. Ship, mark it, and the next time a graph steps up you know in seconds whether your release belongs on the suspect list or can be ruled out.

Infrastructure and configuration changes

A server resize, a new cache rule, a DNS change, a tweak to a CDN setting. These almost never cause an incident, which is exactly why they get forgotten. They do quietly set a new baseline.

Changes other people made

A provider migration, a third-party API version bump, a hosting maintenance window. When the change was not yours, the annotation is what stops the team spending an hour debugging its own code.

Traffic events

A campaign launch, a launch-day feature, a sale. Response time under load only means something next to the reason the load turned up in the first place.

Connect your API for even more flexibility.

With Pulsetic’s API, you’ve got complete control: you can add custom statistics, monitors & automations, create bespoke rules and maintain granular control over who can access or modify monitoring information. Best suited for developers in scale-up or large enterprises.

FAQ: Annotations

What are annotations in Pulsetic?

Notes you place on a monitor's response time chart at a specific moment in time. You give an annotation a date, a short title and optional details, and it appears on the graph as a marked point in time, next to the lines it explains.

What should I annotate?

Anything that could explain a change in the graph. Deploys and releases are the obvious ones, but infrastructure changes, cache and CDN settings, DNS updates, provider migrations, third-party API upgrades and traffic events like a campaign launch are all worth marking. If you would mention it in a post-incident review, it belongs on the chart.

How is an annotation different from a maintenance window or a status page update?

They do different jobs. A maintenance window tells Pulsetic not to alert you during planned work. A status page update tells your users what is going on. An annotation is context for you and your team on the response time chart, and it is the only one of the three that is designed to still be useful months later, when someone asks why the graph changed shape.

Can I add an annotation for something that already happened?

Yes. The date and time are yours to set, so you can mark a change after the fact and it lands at the right point on the chart. That matters during an incident, when the deploy usually gets remembered long after it went out.

Do annotations affect my checks or alerts?

No. An annotation is a note on the chart. It does not pause a monitor, change a check interval or stop an alert from firing. If you want to suppress alerts during planned work, use a maintenance window instead.

Do I need to install anything to use annotations?

No. Annotations live in your Pulsetic dashboard and need no code, no agent and no change to your website. You add one from the response time chart of any monitor you already have.