Grafana Watchers: always-on AI agents for monitoring, free until 1 December

Grafana has released Grafana Assistant Watchers to general availability—always-on AI agents designed to catch what traditional alerting rules miss. The feature, useful for those managing stacks in Grafana Cloud who need to monitor dozens of services without ballooning the AI token bill, entered GA on 20 October 2026, announced at ObservabilityCON in San Francisco.

How it works and what it costs

A Watcher learns what is "normal" for a service described in natural language, then flags deviations without manually configured thresholds. The technical trick lies in dividing the workload: a capable agent performs calibration once (maps telemetry, reads existing alert rules, measures daily and weekly traffic cycles), then every subsequent run is just code plus a single call to a small, fast model.

On the 43 Watchers Grafana runs internally, the company's stated costs are:

Watcher Type	Monthly cost
Median Watcher	under $5
41 Watchers out of 43	under $10
Most expensive (43 checks, every 15 minutes)	just over $20

Grafana's comparison is with a custom-built agent that queries a model every 10 minutes: 4,320 executions per month, which at $0.56–$1.26 per call would run into thousands of dollars monthly.

Billing from 1 December

Watchers remain free until 1 December 2026. From that date, consumption falls under Grafana Assistant's "system-initiated" tokens, billed at $2 per million tokens. According to Grafana's official documentation, Free and Pro plans include a shared pool of 25 million tokens per month for system-initiated use—the same pool drawn on by Investigations automatically triggered by alerts or incidents. Creating more Watchers does not increase this pool.

To try them, create one from AI > Watchers in Grafana Cloud, selecting data sources (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, CloudWatch, generic HTTP APIs) and notification destinations (Slack, Teams, webhooks, Grafana Alerting).