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Section 1 · Journey overview

A watcher uses the intent you describe. An alert rule uses a query and condition you write.

Estimated time: 1 min

How a watcher differs from an alert rule

A Grafana alert rule is a query you write with a fixed condition. A watcher is different: you describe what healthy looks like, and Assistant turns that into checks against your data.

For checkout, an alert rule fires when error rate stays above 5% for the pending period you set, which is how long the condition must be met before the rule starts firing. A watcher can also use context you give it, such as that short spikes during a rollout are expected and that checkout should recover within a few minutes.

Alert ruleWatcher
You provideA query, condition, and pending periodIntent: what healthy looks like, including noise you expect
What “bad” isA threshold you wroteChecks Assistant derived from your data
What it producesFires when the condition holds for the pending periodAn assessment for each completed run
How it notifiesTo a destination you chooseThrough the notifications you turn on

To decide between an alert rule and a watcher for a specific service, refer to Review your alerting strategy. The hands-on learning path creates a watcher and leaves notifications off.