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Path

Create a watcher, calibrate checks against your telemetry, run it, and review the first result.

Estimated time: 13 min

Get started with Assistant Watchers

Assistant Watchers are always-on agents that check a scoped part of your telemetry on a schedule. You describe what to monitor, Assistant calibrates concrete checks against your data, and the watcher raises concern when a run finds something notable.

Watchers are available only in Grafana Cloud. Use them for recurring service health checks, noisy-but-important failure modes, and follow-up monitoring after an incident.

Here’s what to expect

When you complete this path, you’ll be able to:

  • Open Watchers and create a narrow watcher with context, data sources, cadence, and sensitivity
  • Calibrate checks and review the calibration baseline
  • Trigger Run now and pause the automatic runs with the Active switch
  • Check the watcher’s verdict and review the evidence behind All clear, Flagged, or Escalated in a run report

Before you begin

  • A Grafana Cloud account. Create an account if you need one.
  • Grafana Assistant enabled on your stack. If it isn’t enabled yet, Get started with Grafana Assistant shows how.
  • At least one Prometheus, Loki, or BigQuery data source with telemetry for a real service. Calibration must save at least one validated query, and queries that return no data can stop it.
  • Watchers permissions: grafana-assistant-app.watcher-agents:read to view, :create and :write together to create a watcher (creating also starts calibration), :write to calibrate, start, and pause, :create to run once, and :delete to delete. You also need plugins.app:access for the Assistant plugin.

You can only add data sources you’re allowed to query. Watcher runs then query them as the stack’s Assistant service account, so a watcher keeps running if its creator leaves the organization.

For full setup details, refer to Use Assistant Watchers.

Troubleshooting

If you get stuck, we’ve got your back! Where appropriate, troubleshooting information is just a click away.

More to explore

We understand you might want to explore other capabilities not strictly on this path. We’ll provide you opportunities where it makes sense.

Are you ready?
Let's go!