OpenClaw Monitoring, Logging & Anomaly Detection (Hands‑On Guide)

Theory vs practice: Conceptual overview lives in Monitoring overview; this page is operator-focused.

Enable structured logging

openclaw logs --tail 100
openclaw logs --follow
# Persist logs (example systemd/journal or Docker logging driver)

Capture: channel ID, agent ID, skill name, model provider, latency, errors. Redact tokens at ingestion.

Forward to external stacks

  • Loki/Grafana — label by host, agent, channel.
  • Elastic/OpenSearch — index JSON lines from file tailers.
  • CloudWatch/Datadog — ship via agent on VPS installs.

Correlate with gateway health checks from Prism/CLI recipes.

Simple anomaly alerts

  • Spike in outbound HTTP from new skill → page on-call.
  • Repeated auth failures on channel webhooks → channel triage.
  • Sudden token usage 3× baseline → possible prompt injection or runaway cron.

Incident playbook (abbreviated)

  1. Isolate: stop gateway or disable suspect skill.
  2. Preserve: snapshot logs and memory dir.
  3. Rotate: API keys and channel tokens.
  4. Review: known issues; report upstream if needed.