---
title: "Journey overview | Grafana Labs"
description: "What you'll learn, the watcher you'll create, and how long the journey takes."
---

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

# Keep watch on a service without writing every rule first

Describe in plain language what a service should look like, including the noise you expect, and a watcher checks it 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.

## Journey duration

~20-30 minutes