Grafana

ChangeVault can create annotations on your Grafana dashboards whenever a change is created or updated. This lets you correlate infrastructure changes with metrics spikes directly on your graphs.

Prerequisites

• A Grafana instance (self-hosted or Grafana Cloud)
• A Grafana API key or Service Account token with the Editor role
• A ChangeVault Pro plan or higher

1. Create a Grafana API key

Grafana Cloud / newer self-hosted (Service Accounts):

1. Go to Administration → Service Accounts
2. Click Add service account → give it a name (e.g. changevault)
3. Set the role to Editor
4. Click Add service account token and copy the token

Older Grafana (API Keys):

1. Go to Configuration → API Keys
2. Click New API Key
3. Name: changevault, Role: Editor
4. Copy the key

2. Add the connection in ChangeVault

1. Go to Integrations → Notifications
2. Under Grafana, click Add connection
3. Fill in:
   • Label — a name for this connection
   • Grafana URL — e.g. https://grafana.yourcompany.com or your Grafana Cloud URL
   • API key — the token from step 1
   • Tags — optional tags added to every annotation (default: changevault)
4. Click Save

3. Test the connection

Click Test next to the connection. ChangeVault will attempt to create a test annotation and report success or a descriptive error.

How annotations work

When a change is created, ChangeVault creates a point annotation on Grafana with:

• The change title as the annotation text
• Tags from your connection config plus the risk level
• The current timestamp

When a change status is updated to completed or rolled_back, a region annotation is created spanning from the change's creation time to now, making it easy to see the duration of the change window on your graphs.

Viewing annotations in Grafana

Annotations appear as vertical lines on time series panels. To show them:

1. Open a dashboard in Grafana
2. Go to Dashboard settings → Annotations
3. Click Add annotation query → select Built-in and enable All panels or configure a query for the changevault tag

Removing a connection

Click Delete next to the connection in the Integrations panel. Future changes will no longer be annotated via that connection.