---
title: "What's a watcher? | Grafana Labs"
description: "A watcher checks your telemetry on a schedule and reports notable changes, using checks Assistant builds from what you describe."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# 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.

## What each assessment means

The Watchers list shows each watcher’s latest assessment or check status:

| Label              | Meaning                                                              |
|--------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| **All clear**      | The latest completed run found no concerns.                          |
| **Flagged**        | The latest completed run found a warning-level concern.              |
| **Escalated**      | The latest completed run found a critical concern.                   |
| **No verdict yet** | No reliable assessment is available yet.                             |
| **Checks failing** | The latest finished run failed. Open **Run history** to diagnose it. |

A watcher can also notify Slack, Microsoft Teams (if available on your stack), or a webhook endpoint, send findings to Grafana Alerting, and launch an Assistant Investigation for a critical finding. The hands-on path leaves those actions off so you can create, calibrate, run, and read a result first.