Change Overlays

Overview

As teams iterate, deploy code, and continually make changes to their applications and services, it can be difficult to find the exact change that caused a spike in errors, an increase in latency, or slower page load times. Use Change overlays to identify when a recent change is causing performance issues within your application or services and find the source of the problem.

View the moment a change occurs in the context of your Datadog observability data to pinpoint issues to specific releases, correlate changes with metrics, and troubleshoot faster. Change overlays supports APM service deployments.

Overlay changes on graphs

To get started, click Show Overlays in the upper right corner of your dashboard.

Overlays automatically appear on timeseries graphs filtered with the service tag for services configured with version tags. To enable deployments in your APM services, add version tags to your configuration.

Click on any event overlay to open a side panel with more information and analyze the impact of your change.

Show faulty deploys

Use the toggle in the overlays panel to only show faulty deployments that could be impacting your metrics.

Override automatic detection

Override the automatic service detection by using the search bar to find the service of interest.

Analyze the impact of your change

Click on any overlay on your graph to open a change analysis page, allowing you to understand the status and impact of you change.

APM deployments

For APM deployments, you can:

Compare the version selected to overall service performance for requests, errors, or latency
View the rollout of your version by region, env, or datacenter
See new Error Tracking issues that have been introduced with the new deployment
Check related infrastructure that your service is running on

FAQ

When do overlays appear?

For APM deployments, overlays appear on timeseries graphs that:

Are filtered by the service tag in the query
Have the service set up with the version tag

What are deployments scoped to?

For APM deployments, an env must be specified. If you have an env or datacenter template variable set in your dashboard, deployments are filtered to match the selection. Otherwise, the env defaults to prod.