---
title: "Why Assistant Watchers | Grafana Labs"
description: "Explain what Assistant Watchers do and when to use one instead of, or alongside, an alert rule."
---

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

# Why Assistant Watchers

A watcher is an always-on agent. You describe what healthy looks like for a service or failure mode. Assistant turns that intent into checks, then the watcher scans telemetry on a schedule and raises concern when a run finds something notable.

A watcher can stay quiet when signals look normal. When it does raise concern, it can notify Slack, Microsoft Teams, or a webhook endpoint, send findings to Grafana Alerting, and launch an Assistant Investigation for critical findings.

Use a watcher for these kinds of work:

- Recurring service health checks
- Noisy-but-important failure modes
- Follow-up monitoring after an incident

A watcher can also help where an alert rule is hard to write. For example, a new service can benefit from a flexible watcher while its normal ranges are still changing.

In this path you will:

1. Open Watchers and create a watcher with a narrow scope
2. Calibrate checks against your telemetry
3. Trigger **Run now** and pause the automatic runs with the **Active** switch
4. Check the watcher’s verdict and review a run report

In the next milestone, you’ll open Watchers and create one.

* * *

### More to explore (optional)

- [Use Assistant Watchers](https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/platform/grafana-assistant/platform/watchers/)