Notebooks

Overview

Notebooks combine graphs and text in a linear, cell-based format. They are designed to help you explore and share stories with your data by creating postmortems, investigations, runbooks, documentation, and more.

Live Collaboration

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.

Notebook List

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:

My Notebooks: Notebooks created by you.
Other Notebooks: Notebooks created by other members of your team.

New Notebook

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.

Types of content

Notebooks support visualizations and text cells.

Visualization

Graphs in notebooks support all Datadog data sources: metrics, log events, analyzed spans, live processes, network traffic, RUM events, profiling metrics, and security signals.

Graphs are created with the Datadog query editor. Notebooks support:

Text

Text in a notebook is formatted with Markdown, which enables the use of headings, subheadings, links, images, lists, and code blocks.

Manipulating cells

When an existing notebook is opened, the cells are in a closed state. 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. 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, or use a keyboard shortcut. A list of all keyboard shortcuts is available by clicking the keyboard button in the notebook header.

Time frames

By default, all graph cells adhere to the global time frame set in the notebook header. However, individual cells can be unlocked from the global time and set to an independent time frame. This allows for the comparison of metrics over multiple, distinct periods of time within a single notebook, which is suited for incident investigations.

To set an individual time frame, click the clock icon in the top-right corner of a graph cell. Then, uncheck Lock this cell to global time frame and set your preferred time frame:

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.

Expand

Expand the graph by clicking on the expand icon on the right side of the cell. More details about full screen mode is available on the Widgets page.

Layout options

The following layout options are available by clicking the grid icon on the right side of the cell in edit mode:

Graph size: Choose between XS, S, M (default), L, and XL.
Graph legend: Uncheck the box to hide the legend. Legends are automatically disabled for XS and S graphs.
Grouping: Display one graph per tag value to see small multiples of your visualization.