Journey overview on Grafana Labs

Journey overview

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:59:38 -0400

Monitor services that a fixed threshold doesn’t fit

If you’ve written alert rules, you know each one needs a query and a fixed condition. That works when you can name the threshold, but some services are harder to pin down: error spikes are expected during deployments, or normal behavior shifts as the service changes. A watcher suits that kind of monitoring. You describe what healthy looks like, including the noise you expect, and the watcher checks your data on a schedule.

This journey explains what Assistant Watchers are and when to use one, then walks you through creating, calibrating, running, and reviewing a watcher in your Grafana Cloud stack.

What you’ll learn

Here’s what this journey covers:

What a watcher is: What it checks and the assessments it reports.
When to use one: The kinds of monitoring work a watcher suits.
How it differs from an alert rule: You describe intent instead of writing a condition, and Assistant can recommend either or both for a service.
How to create one: Keep the scope narrow, give context Assistant can’t infer from telemetry, and let Assistant build the checks from your data.
How to read a result: Trigger a run, check the standing verdict, and review the evidence behind it.
How to keep it current: Recalibrate after changes, let Assistant review the checks on a schedule, restore an earlier version, and track token usage.

Journey duration

~20-30 minutes

What's a watcher?

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:59:38 -0400

What’s a watcher?

A watcher checks your telemetry on a schedule and reports notable changes. You describe what to monitor, Assistant builds checks from your data, and you review the findings and adjust the watcher as your service changes. Depending on the data sources you select, a watcher can check metrics, logs, trace-derived metrics, profiles, and other data.

Why use a watcher?

Service health checks: A watcher checks the same scope on each scheduled run and notifies you when an issue needs attention, not on every run.
Services with expected noise: Describe the behavior you expect, such as brief error spikes during deployments, and focus the watcher on the signals that need attention.
Services that change over time: Turn on automatic recalibration, and Assistant reviews and updates the watcher’s checks on a schedule.
Follow-up monitoring after an incident: Keep a watcher running on the affected service, and set a stop time for a limited monitoring window.

The hands-on learning path leaves notifications off so you can create, calibrate, run, and read a result first. Refer to Manage watcher notifications when you want a watcher to send findings somewhere.

How a watcher differs from an alert rule

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:59:38 -0400

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 rule	Watcher
You provide	A query, condition, and pending period	Intent: what healthy looks like, including noise you expect
What “bad” is	A threshold you wrote	Checks Assistant derived from your data
What it produces	Fires when the condition holds for the pending period	An assessment for each completed run
How it notifies	To a destination you choose	Through 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.

Prerequisites

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:59:38 -0400

Prerequisites

To complete the hands-on learning path in this journey, you need the following.

Requirement	Why you need it
Grafana Cloud account (Create an account)	Watchers need a Grafana Cloud stack.
Grafana Assistant enabled	Watchers are an Assistant capability. Accept any required Assistant terms. Assistant is billed based on usage, and each watcher run uses tokens from your plan’s allowance. Refer to Understand Grafana Assistant pricing and usage.
A supported data source that’s receiving data from a service	Watchers support Prometheus, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Loki, BigQuery, Infinity, CloudWatch, Synthetic Monitoring, Tempo, and Pyroscope data sources that you can read and query. Assistant builds the watcher’s checks from that data, so pick a service that’s sending data now. Data sources that limit what each team can see with label-based access control (LBAC) rules aren’t supported.
Permission to use Watchers	You need permission to view, create, and run watchers. The Assistant User role includes Watchers. If you don’t have access, ask your Grafana administrator.

Complete setup first

If Assistant isn’t enabled on your stack, follow Set up Grafana Assistant in Grafana Cloud. On some stacks, an administrator must enable it.

For the exact permissions each Watchers action needs, refer to Manage Assistant access with RBAC.