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, with any required Assistant terms accepted. If it isn’t enabled yet, follow Set up Grafana Assistant in Grafana Cloud. On some stacks, an administrator must enable it.
• A Prometheus, Loki, or BigQuery data source that’s receiving data from a service now. Assistant builds the watcher’s checks from that data.
• Permission to view, create, and run watchers. The Assistant User role includes Watchers. For the exact permissions, refer to Manage Assistant access with RBAC.

Assistant is billed based on usage, and each watcher run uses tokens from your plan’s allowance. Refer to Understand Grafana Assistant pricing and usage.

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.