Health checks

Short guide to verify Gateway and channel health without guessing. It covers the CLI health checks, the HTTP probe endpoints, the dedicated health command, and uptime monitoring.

Quick checks

• openclaw status - local summary: gateway reachability/mode, update hint, linked channel auth age, sessions + recent activity.
• openclaw status --all - full local diagnosis (read-only, color, safe to paste for debugging).
• openclaw status --deep - asks the running gateway for a live probe (health with probe:true), including per-account channel probes when supported.
• openclaw status --usage - show model provider usage/quota snapshots.
• openclaw health - asks the running gateway for its health snapshot (WS-only; no direct channel sockets from the CLI).
• openclaw health --verbose (alias --debug) - forces a live health probe and prints gateway connection details.
• openclaw health --json - machine-readable health snapshot output.
• Send /status as a standalone chat command in any channel to get a status reply without invoking the agent.
• Logs: run openclaw logs --follow (or openclaw --profile <profile> logs --follow) and filter for web-heartbeat, web-reconnect, web-auto-reply, web-inbound.

For Discord and other chat providers, session rows are not socket liveness. openclaw sessions, Gateway sessions.list, and the agent sessions_list tool read stored conversation state. A provider can reconnect and show healthy channel status before any new session row is materialized. Use the channel status and health commands above for live connectivity checks.

Per-agent session counts and recent activity include only that agent's sessions, even when agents share a SQLite session store. Status counts each physical store once in its aggregate. The top-level health session summary represents the default agent, or the first configured agent when there is no default; it is not a fleet total. A running Gateway serves clean health and status session summaries from its resident session-row projection. Store hydration and exact dirty-row refreshes retain the existing read-only SQLite fallback.

Deep diagnostics

openclaw health --json reports modelRuntime.degraded: true when a large fleet's model preparation exceeds the startup budget. pendingAgents names the agents still preparing and stage identifies the current acquisition phase. The Gateway remains running and completed agents remain usable. Background preparation clears the degraded status when all runtimes are ready.

Health and status collection groups fast session-store reads into short work slices, keeping busy background preparation from delaying every individual read. Slow reads finish their transaction before yielding to other Gateway work.

• Creds on disk: ls -l ~/.openclaw/credentials/whatsapp/<accountId>/creds.json (mtime should be recent).
• Session store: ls -l ~/.openclaw/agents/<agentId>/agent/openclaw-agent.sqlite. Count and recent recipients are surfaced via status.
• Relink flow: openclaw channels logout && openclaw channels login --verbose when status codes 409-515 or loggedOut appear in logs. The QR login flow auto-restarts once for status 515 after pairing.
• Diagnostics are enabled by default (diagnostics.enabled: false disables them). Memory events record RSS/heap byte counts and threshold/growth pressure. Liveness warnings record event-loop delay/utilization, CPU-core ratio, and active/waiting/queued session counts when the process is running but saturated. Oversized-payload events record what was rejected/truncated/chunked plus sizes and limits, never message text, attachment contents, webhook bodies, raw request/response bodies, tokens, cookies, or secret values.
• The same heartbeat drives the bounded stability recorder: openclaw gateway stability (or the diagnostics.stability Gateway RPC). Fatal Gateway exits, shutdown timeouts, and restart startup failures persist the latest snapshot under ~/.openclaw/logs/stability/. Inspect the newest bundle with openclaw gateway stability --bundle latest.
• For bug reports, run openclaw gateway diagnostics export and attach the generated zip: a Markdown summary, the newest stability bundle, sanitized log metadata, sanitized Gateway status/health snapshots, and config shape. Chat text, webhook bodies, tool outputs, credentials, cookies, account/message identifiers, and secret values are omitted or redacted. See Diagnostics Export.

Health monitor config

• channels.<provider>.healthMonitor.enabled: disable health-monitor restarts for a specific channel while leaving global monitoring enabled.
• channels.<provider>.accounts.<accountId>.healthMonitor.enabled: multi-account override that wins over the channel-level setting.
• These per-channel overrides apply to the channels that expose them today: Discord, Google Chat, iMessage, IRC, Microsoft Teams, Signal, Slack, Telegram, and WhatsApp.
• A crashing channel is recovered by its own auto-restart backoff first (auto-restart attempt N/10 in the logs). The health monitor stays out of the way until that ladder ends with giving up after 10 restart attempts, then takes over as the last restart owner.

Inbound ingress health

Channel connectivity and inbound admission are separate failure domains. A channel can hold a healthy transport connection — sending replies normally — while its durable ingress queue is unavailable, so not a single inbound message is admitted.

• When a channel cannot open its durable ingress queue, its start fails and the gateway records the account as unable to receive. openclaw channels status reports Channel cannot admit inbound events; its durable ingress queue is unavailable. Outbound may still work.
• Such an account is unhealthy regardless of transport state, and readiness reports it as failing. Previously it reported health: healthy and the health monitor never touched it.
• Recovery stays automatic. The ingress verdict describes the account's last start attempt and is cleared by the next one, so the ordinary restart path is also how a transient queue-open failure recovers. Those restarts log as health-monitor: restarting (reason: ingress-unavailable) instead of the generic stuck.
• If the restarts keep repeating, the cause is not transient. Check the logged ingress failure: a plugin denied the openChannelIngressQueue capability, for example, needs operator action rather than another restart.
• Channels that never report ingress state are unaffected: absence means "no signal", never "broken". There is no traffic-staleness heuristic, so a genuinely quiet channel is never marked unhealthy for having received nothing.

HTTP probes

The Gateway exposes three unauthenticated GET/HEAD probe pairs:

/startupz returns 503 with status: "starting" while startup sidecars are pending, 503 with status: "draining" during drain, and 200 with status: "started" otherwise. Use /readyz when traffic admission requires usable agents. A refused default or system agent database keeps readiness false after any migration outcome, with failing: ["agent-database:<id>"] and the exact admission reason and repair hint in agentDatabases. A refused optional agent can remain isolated while healthy agents serve requests. Gateway ready announcements use the same readiness decision.

A broken Telegram or other channel account can also make /readyz return 503 while /startupz remains started. Neither probe replaces the other: startup completion alone does not certify agent or channel availability.

Remote unauthenticated startup responses contain only ok and status. Local-direct and authenticated callers also receive version, uptimeMs, and pendingReason while startup is pending. Readiness details follow the same local-or-authenticated gate because they can name failing subsystems.

Plugin replacement recovery

During plugin replacement or recovery, /readyz returns 503. Detailed responses include failing: ["plugin-reload"] and a pluginReload object with the affected pluginIds, the current phase (reloading, recovering, or failed), and any recovery deadlineAtMs and actionable reason. These owner-reported facts bypass the channel readiness cache, so a failed replacement cannot appear as only a generic channel outage or stale healthy result.

The health monitor does not spend channel restart attempts while replacement holds channel admission paused. After successful rollback, the previous plugin configuration restarts its channels and ordinary readiness checks resume. If automatic recovery reaches its deadline, phase: "failed" retains the failure reason and next action. Admission pauses are released, allowing the monitor to restart callable channels; a plugin whose admitted work or cleanup still owns resources requires the reported repair or retry before it can restart. See Config hot reload for the recovery contract.

CPU pressure and event-loop delay

Detailed readiness can include the latest completed eventLoop diagnostic snapshot. The sampler owns observation windows; health reads do not reset a pending measurement. No snapshot is available until the first window completes. Its cpuCoreRatio measures user and system CPU time across the whole Gateway process, including worker and native threads, divided by elapsed wall time. The unit is core equivalents: 1 means one CPU core fully occupied over the interval, and parallel work can produce values above 1. It is not a percentage of the host's total CPU capacity.

The health RPC also reads the latest completed sample when returning a cached summary or publishing a newly collected one. Slow channel checks do not freeze its CPU and delay readings. If the sampler resets, health responses omit eventLoop until a new window completes instead of reviving a cached sample.

The optional cpuBreakdown separates independent native counters:

• hostUtilization is the busy fraction of the host CPU time reported by os.cpus(), from 0 to 1 across hostCpuCount logical CPUs. This includes other processes and is not the Gateway's CPU quota or container allowance.
• mainThreadCoreRatio measures the Gateway main thread with process.threadCpuUsage(), not event-loop utilization.
• workerCoreRatio sums Worker.cpuUsage() counters for workers owned by the task pools and SQLite broker. It does not include subprocesses, remote workers, or workers created outside those owners.
• otherThreadsCoreRatio is an estimated residual: process CPU minus the measured main and tracked worker CPU, clamped at zero. It includes untracked workers and native threads, not a measured worker category.

Thread values use the same core-equivalent unit as cpuCoreRatio. Worker reads are asynchronous and must complete within 100 ms of each sampling boundary; these are not atomic cross-thread measurements. The residual can vary with measurement skew. A timed-out request never delays the event-loop sample, and at most one native request is outstanding per tracked worker, even across monitor resets. Startup, worker creation/exit, host CPU topology changes, counter resets, and collection failures require fresh baselines before publishing the affected rates. Missing fields mean unavailable, not zero.

The main-thread and host counters are collected independently on Node and Bun. Tracked worker CPU and the residual are omitted on Bun: its worker API can report zero when native counter collection fails. Unsupported or failed native APIs on any platform leave the corresponding field absent.

The Control UI's CPU box reads the same sampler through system.info.eventLoop. Its detail overlay shows host usage separately from the process and thread breakdown. Process and thread percentages use 100% for one fully occupied core; host usage uses 100% for all reported logical CPUs. Values show a dash until their first complete measurement, or while unavailable.

Event-loop delay and utilization describe the main thread separately. A cpu degradation reason reports process CPU pressure with delay co-evidence; it does not identify the thread consuming CPU or prove a main-thread hang. Inspect the delay measurements alongside CPU pressure. The eventLoop diagnostic does not change the readiness result by itself.

Uptime monitoring

External uptime monitoring services should use the dedicated /health endpoint, not /v1/chat/completions.

• DO use: GET /health - instant response, no session created, no LLM call, returns {"ok":true,"status":"live"}
• DON'T use: /v1/chat/completions for health checks - each request creates a full agent session with skill snapshot, context assembly, and LLM calls

When no x-openclaw-session-key header or user field is provided, /v1/chat/completions generates a new random session for each request. Monitoring services that ping every 15 minutes create ~96 sessions/day, each consuming 4-22KB. Over time this causes session store bloat and can lead to context window overflow.

Monitoring service setup examples

• BetterStack: Set health check URL to https://<your-gateway-host>:<port>/health
• UptimeRobot: Add a new HTTP monitor with URL https://<your-gateway-host>:<port>/health
• Generic: Any HTTP GET to /health returns 200 with {"ok":true,"status":"live"} while the gateway's HTTP server is live

When something fails

• logged out or status 409-515 -> relink with openclaw channels logout then openclaw channels login.
• Gateway unreachable -> start it: openclaw gateway --port 18789 (use --force if the port is busy).
• No inbound messages -> confirm linked phone is online and the sender is allowed (channels.whatsapp.allowFrom); for group chats, ensure allowlist + mention rules match (channels.whatsapp.groups, agents.entries.*.groupChat.mentionPatterns).

Dedicated "health" command

openclaw health asks the running gateway for its health snapshot (no direct channel sockets from the CLI). By default it returns a fresh cached gateway snapshot and the gateway refreshes that cache in the background; --verbose forces a live probe instead. Connections and cached health reads share a one-minute background refresh cadence, so repeated diagnostic connections do not each rebuild the health snapshot. Explicit live probes and refreshes for missing or stale health still run immediately. Snapshots describe loaded and configured channels. Stored credentials alone do not activate a channel or add it to Gateway health; use channel setup to enable it. The command reports linked creds/auth age when available, per-channel probe summaries, session-store summary, and probe duration. Live probes use bounded account concurrency and a Gateway-owned deadline, so one slow account returns a structured timeout while completed sibling results remain available. The command exits non-zero if the gateway is unreachable or the Gateway call itself times out.

Queue warnings

A successful health RPC reports top-level ok: true. That value means the Gateway produced the snapshot; it does not mean every delivery queue is clear. Check deliveryQueues.ingressPressure for durable inbound lanes that may be blocking later events. The field is omitted when no pressured lanes are found.

Ingress pressure uses conservative built-in diagnostic thresholds, not authoritative retry or claim policy for any plugin. A durable lane appears only when an active pending or claimed row has either reached at least eight attempts and has a recorded delivery error, or a claimed row has not refreshed its claim for 30 minutes. Ordinary retries 1-7 are absent. Claim-recovery increments without a recorded error are also absent, while live claims stay absent because their claim timestamp is refreshed. Rows without a durable lane key are omitted because they cannot prove that later events are blocked; runtime persists a derived lane after a real derived-lane retry.

Each result is grouped by channel account and reports pressured lane, pending, claimed, and blocked counts plus the oldest affected receive time. All active rows in a pressured lane contribute to those counts. The snapshot never includes lane IDs, event IDs, payloads, claim owners or tokens, recorded errors, or session and target identifiers.

Options:

• --json: machine-readable JSON output
• --timeout <ms>: override the default 10s Gateway connection timeout; it does not widen the Gateway's internal live-probe deadline
• --verbose: force a live probe and print gateway connection details
• --debug: alias for --verbose

The health snapshot includes: ok (boolean), ts (timestamp), durationMs (probe time), per-channel status, agent availability, session-store summary, and optional delivery-queue warnings.

Related

• Gateway runbook
• Diagnostics export
• Gateway troubleshooting
• openclaw health — request this snapshot over RPC from the CLI