---
title: "How a watcher differs from an alert rule | Grafana Labs"
description: "A watcher uses the intent you describe. An alert rule uses a query and condition you write."
---

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

# 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](https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/platform/grafana-assistant/platform/watchers/#review-your-alerting-strategy). The hands-on learning path creates a watcher and leaves notifications off.