Notebooks combine graphs and text in a linear, cell-based format. They help you explore and share stories with your data by creating postmortems, investigations, runbooks, documentation, and more.
Notebooks support real-time collaboration. Presence indicators show who is viewing your notebook at any time; indicators also appear beside any cell that another user is currently editing.
Changes made to a notebook appear automatically, without the need to refresh.
Everyone on your team can open or edit any notebook, but a notebook can only be deleted by the creator or by an administrator.
To add a comment, select some text or hover over a graph. The Add comment button will appear to the right of the cell.
To edit or delete a comment you wrote, click the menu on the top-right of your comment.
View or re-open resolved comments in the Comment History, available in the Notebook cog menu.
Notebook authors receive email notifications for new comments on their notebooks, and commenters are notified for replies to their comments. Manage your notification settings through Notifications in the notebook cog menu.
The Notebook List allows you to view and search previously created notebooks. Each notebook’s name, creator, and last modified date are displayed. Notebooks are grouped by:
The Notebook List also displays preset templates and tutorials. Edit these templates directly, and click Clone to save your changes.
Create a new notebook from the main navigation: Notebooks > New Notebook.
A new notebook is not saved by default. You must click the Save button.
Notebooks support visualizations and text cells.
Graphs in notebooks support all Datadog data sources: metrics, log events, Indexed Spans, live processes, network traffic, RUM events, profiling metrics, and security signals.
Graphs are created with the Datadog query editor. Notebooks support:
Text in a notebook is formatted with Markdown, which enables the use of headings, subheadings, links, images, lists, and code blocks.
To open a cell for editing, mouse over it and use CMD + Click, or click Edit. To close a cell, click outside it, press ESC, or press CMD + Enter. Use Cancel to discard your changes to the cell. Only one cell may be open at a time.
To insert cells, use the + button that appears to the left of the cell. To share, clone, or delete cells, use the action tray that appears above the cell on hover. Graph cells can be exported to a dashboard, or downloaded as a PNG or a CSV of graph data.
Click on the full screen icon on the right side of the cell to edit with the graphing editor. Under Graph your data, add details like event overlays, markers, and y-axis controls. View and edit the graph JSON directly in the JSON tab.
The following layout options are available by clicking the grid icon on the right side of the cell in edit mode:
XS, S, M (default), L, and XL.XS and S graphs.Note: Changing any of these settings only affects the targeted cell.
Copy the URL for a specific cell by clicking the chain-link icon on the right side of the cell. Direct linking is available for both visualization and Markdown cells.
When a user visits the URL for a specific cell, the notebook is opened to show the cell at the top of the viewport. Links are absolute. A cell’s URL remains the same even if it is moved to a new position within the notebook.
By default, all graph cells are linked to the global time frame set in the notebook header.
To view a different time frame, select an option in the global time picker, or scrub on a graph directly. The notebook URL will update to reflect this new time frame without saving it to the notebook.
Note: Clicking and dragging to zoom in on a graph does not unlock the cell from the global time. It changes the notebook’s global time instead.
To save this time as the notebook’s default, click Update Default. The reset button discards your changes to time.
Individual cells can be unlinked from the global time and set to an independent time frame.
To view a different time frame on a single cell, edit the cell and use the toggle to unlink it from Global Time. Change the time frame using the time picker or by scrubbing on the graph. Changes made in edit mode are saved automatically when you click Done. To discard your changes, click Cancel instead of Done.
Notebooks can be set to automatically snapshot graphs that might expire. Enable this by clicking Turn on graph snapshots in the cog menu of any notebook. Once snapshots are enabled, use the cog menu to view snapshots or turn off automatic snapshotting. Turning off automatic snapshotting will remove access to existing snapshots.
Notebooks with snapshotting enabled automatically capture a static image of any graphs with a fixed time range (for example, Aug 18, 12:00 am – Aug 19, 11:59 pm). These snapshots update when the graph is updated, as long as the new graph also has a fixed time range. Changing the graph to a global time range (like Past 1 Hour) removes the snapshot.
You can preview the existing snapshot on any fixed-time graph by hovering over the camera icon while in edit mode.
To share a version of your notebook with snapshots, click View graph snapshots in the notebook header and copy the URL, or append &view=snapshots to the URL of any notebook that has snapshots enabled.
Use the Share menu in the upper right of a notebook to see sharing options. Notebooks can be exported to PDF, Markdown, or any document editor.
To copy a notebook into a document editor, click Copy formatted contents. Paste into a document editor like Google Docs or Microsoft Word to see notebook contents, including graphs, with original formatting (example below).
Use Export Notebook JSON to download a JSON file containing the definition of your notebook. Import Notebook JSON overwrites all content on the notebook with the content of the uploaded JSON.
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
