# How can Watchers be tested?

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-can-watchers-be-tested/65384
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Tags:** elastic-stack-alerting
**Created:** [November 8, 2016, 5:38pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-can-watchers-be-tested/65384 "2016-11-08T17:38:17Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 5

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### Author: ![Ryan\_Grannell](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/ryan_grannell/32/41712_2.png) [@Ryan\_Grannell](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Ryan_Grannell)
#### Post date: [November 17, 2016, 5:11pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-can-watchers-be-tested/65384/5 "2016-11-17T17:11:00Z")

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Hi,

Yes, that makes more sense. I'm still looking for a way to provide a "pre-queried" set of logs to the watcher though (or a manually-uploaded list of documents), rather than pointing it at an active index.

It seems that Watcher doesn't directly support this, so the only way I can think of getting this to work is:

- Manually query a test-set of logs using the query / aggs block of the watcher
- Provide this result-set to the watcher using `alternative_input`, with simulate mode enabled
- Check the expected action was triggered

This will work, it's just a little awkward.

Thanks for your help

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