Prometheus metrics

OpenClaw can expose diagnostics metrics through the official diagnostics-prometheus plugin. It listens to trusted diagnostics plus internally tagged, dispatcher-owned diagnostic events (queue, memory, and session-recovery signals), and renders a Prometheus text endpoint at:

GET /api/diagnostics/prometheus

Content type is text/plain; version=0.0.4; charset=utf-8, the standard Prometheus exposition format.

For traces, logs, OTLP push, and OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic attributes, see OpenTelemetry export.

Quick start

openclaw plugins install clawhub:@openclaw/diagnostics-prometheus

{  plugins: {    allow: ["diagnostics-prometheus"],    entries: {      "diagnostics-prometheus": { enabled: true },    },  },  diagnostics: {    enabled: true,  },}

openclaw plugins enable diagnostics-prometheus

openclaw gateway restart

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENCLAW_GATEWAY_TOKEN" \  http://127.0.0.1:18789/api/diagnostics/prometheus

# prometheus.ymlscrape_configs:  - job_name: openclaw    scrape_interval: 30s    metrics_path: /api/diagnostics/prometheus    authorization:      credentials_file: /etc/prometheus/openclaw-gateway-token    static_configs:      - targets: ["openclaw-gateway:18789"]

Metrics exported

For model-call metrics, observation_unit="request" measures one observable provider request. observation_unit="turn" measures a synthetic Claude Code or Codex CLI agent turn that can contain multiple hidden provider requests. Keep those series separate when comparing latency.

Gateway RPC metrics cover valid authenticated WebSocket requests, including subsequent rejections. first_response measures receipt through the first frame accepted by the sender; unavailable or suppressed sends have no duration sample. handler measures actual handler invocation through return or throw, and admission measures receipt through that invocation. queue_wait measures only operator request start-queue wait, separately from command/session lane metrics. They measure elapsed time, not CPU time. Early acknowledgments and responses after handler return are distinct from completed agent work. See Gateway RPC timing semantics.

Receipt begins after the connected client's request frame passes validation. These timings exclude CLI startup, local diagnostics, connection/authentication setup, and event-loop delay before request dispatch. Histograms record completed observations: an unfinished handler has no handler-duration sample yet. Compare request counts, completed timings, and event-loop observations when investigating a timeout; low handler latency alone does not establish a responsive client path.

RPC method labels contain exact core and registered plugin method names, other for unregistered requests, or unknown for unrecognized dedicated worker RPCs. Catalog membership is checked at request receipt, so plugin registry replacement affects subsequent requests without a separate label cache. Outcome totals aggregate by phase and outcome without a method dimension. Each method with all four timings, both byte histograms, and the exclusive-sample counter occupies eight aggregate samples in the shared 2,048-sample cap. An RPC duration histogram occupies one sample but expands into 19 scrape series (buckets, sum, and count). The response-size and signed heap-delta histograms expand into 20 and 38 series respectively; see RPC response size and heap changes. Existing samples keep updating when the cap fills; unseen RPC or other operational samples are refused and increment openclaw_prometheus_series_dropped_total. Monitor that counter: coverage of every core method can fill the cap, so a zero value matters when interpreting totals or latency percentiles. Async diagnostic queue saturation can also drop observations, reported by openclaw_diagnostic_async_queue_dropped_total.

HTTP cancellations

openclaw_gateway_http_cancelled_total counts HTTP requests cancelled before completion, with source="client" for disconnected clients and source="shutdown" for Gateway shutdown. These expected cancellations do not produce unhandled-request error logs. The metric carries no request URLs, file paths, or client identifiers and follows the existing diagnostics enablement and asynchronous queue limits. Normal HTTP cancellations are not retained in the stability event buffer.

Worktree preparation

openclaw_worktree_preparation_seconds records each managed checkout or sandbox preparation, including failures. kind distinguishes managed creation from sandbox projection and backend readiness. template distinguishes warm, cold, unavailable, and reused existing projections; outcome is returned or threw. phase=total is the complete elapsed time. Other fixed phases are allocate, checkout, setup, templatePrepare, templateApply, snapshot, synchronizeCanonical, synchronizeProjection, workspaceLayout, and containerStart. Only entered phases are recorded. Nested phases are inclusive and must not be summed. No paths, session identifiers, or template keys become metric labels.

Catalog list stages

The stage histograms currently cover only sessions.catalog.list. They use six fixed phase labels:

Each entered phase contributes one completed elapsed observation, including when that phase throws. Unvisited phases are absent. Metadata-only requests do not enter these phases. Provider and projection durations include awaited work and scheduling; they are not CPU time or exclusive ownership of shared work.

The thread-CPU histogram records only planning and delivery. Its intervals never cross an await and finish before telemetry emission. They include same-thread native work and garbage collection, but exclude worker CPU, background materialization and progress publications. They are selected CPU intervals, not a complete request CPU total. If a CPU counter read fails, that CPU observation is omitted while elapsed timing and the request outcome remain available. Compare each metric's own count when computing means.

These trusted, payload-free observations use the existing bounded diagnostic queue and exporter endpoint whenever diagnostics and an interested trusted consumer are active. They have no slow-log threshold and add no request, session, provider or host labels. The six elapsed and two CPU populations consume at most eight aggregate samples, or 152 exposed histogram series, under the existing 2,048-sample cap. Startup-phase emission and its whole-process CPU semantics are unchanged.

An OpenTelemetry exporter with traces disabled does not request phase events. A configured Prometheus exporter records these observations as metrics without requiring OpenTelemetry traces.

Current sessions and work

Use openclaw_sessions_active for current session load. Its two series count running and queued sessions using the same live-run projection as sessions.list with activeOnly: true. The count covers the full operator roster, including global and unknown sessions, before pagination; archived sessions and cron-run history use the list's default exclusions. Compare with an unfiltered operator list using includeGlobal: true and includeUnknown: true, not a list restricted to one agent or viewer.

openclaw_gateway_active_work exposes three counts from the Gateway's existing active-work snapshot:

These categories overlap. Do not sum them to obtain a total run or session count. They cover session and run activity, not the complete suspension-blocker inventory; zero alone does not establish that the Gateway can suspend. Both gauges refresh on owner changes while the exporter is active, without polling or reading transcripts. They return to zero when the relevant work drains. Before the Gateway projection is ready, and after it stops, the series are absent rather than reporting an assumed idle state.

openclaw_session_state_total is a cumulative counter of state observations since exporter start, not a current session count or a count of unique sessions. Repeated observations of processing keep increasing it; completion does not decrement it. For example, processing=60 can coexist with zero live sessions. Use rate(openclaw_session_state_total[5m]) to measure observation frequency. openclaw_session_queue_depth is likewise only the latest observed individual session queue depth per diagnostic state, not total queued work.

sum(openclaw_sessions_active)openclaw_gateway_active_work{kind="queuedTurns"}

Runtime identity

openclaw_gateway_build_info has value 1 and identifies the process serving the scrape. Its process_instance_id is the same process-owned UUID returned by system.info; it changes when the process restarts, including when a PID is reused. build_id matches the loaded build reported by hello.server.buildId and is omitted when that provenance is unavailable. Updating files on disk does not change the running process's identity.

When diagnostics are enabled, the exporter captures these facts at service startup, before recording events. The metric uses one aggregate sample under the existing cap. Older hosts without the optional runtime-identity capability omit it. The UUID is confined to this info metric; it is not added to RPC or other metric labels.

Use the info sample from the same scrape to attribute new measurements and split counter intervals at process changes. It is not a health signal, a request ID, or an exporter epoch: restarting the exporter in the same process resets its counters while retaining the process identity. It cannot relabel older samples or establish complete diagnostic-loss coverage.

Event-loop observation windows

openclaw_liveness_cpu_core_ratio measures whole-process CPU usage in core equivalents, including worker and native threads, and can exceed 1. Interpret it alongside main-thread delay and utilization; see CPU pressure and event-loop delay.

The event-loop histogram records the maximum delay from each completed Gateway health-monitor window. The counter sums the seconds represented by those windows. Both are cumulative: a later healthy window does not erase an earlier high-delay observation. Readiness, status, and scrape requests consume completed observations without advancing or resetting the sampling window.

The monitor samples elapsed event-loop intervals every 20 milliseconds and completes a window after at least one second, or sooner for a delay warning. It preserves the pending interval across ordinary window resets, so reading health before an overdue sample cannot erase that delay. Histogram counts are window counts, not stall counts. Histogram quantiles describe window maxima, not the sampled event-loop delay distribution or its overall p99. These metrics have no request labels or trace attribution and do not identify the JavaScript function that blocked.

Collection uses the plugin enablement above. It starts when an interested metrics exporter is running; it does not backfill earlier windows. Intentional monitor resets discard the unfinished window. Diagnostic queue drops, the exporter's series cap, and process restarts can also lose observations. Watch the existing drop counters and the represented-duration counter when assessing coverage. Readiness decisions and persistent liveness-warning thresholds are unchanged.

Worker request queues

openclaw_worker_queue_depth{kind} reports requests awaiting dispatch across worker owners of that kind. It includes SQLite writer capacity waiters and scoped read-only requests, and excludes requests that already hold an execution slot. openclaw_worker_queue_wait_seconds{kind,request_class} measures enqueue to dispatch; openclaw_worker_request_seconds{kind,request_class} measures dispatch to reply or failure. Both use the existing duration histogram buckets. Cancellation before dispatch removes the queued request without adding a duration sample.

Task kinds use their registered runtime entrypoint names, such as gitOperations, preparedModelCatalog, codeModeNode, and sessionTranscript. Standalone bundled workers have fixed names such as diskBudget, memorySearch, and teamReports. Unrecognized SDK worker filenames use extension; arbitrary filenames and paths never become labels. This replaces the broad compute and other task buckets and renames previous grouped task kinds, so update queries that select those older labels.

SQLite transport kinds remain sqlite_read and sqlite_writer. Request classes retain open, close, transcript_read, sessions, transcripts, domain_execute, plugin_state, auth_profiles, and cron. Other commands use a fixed operation family, such as workerInference, capture, or diagnostic. Audit writer, database lifecycle, and state lease commands have finer labels such as audit.writer.process, database.inspectIdle, and stateLease.renew. Unknown commands retain execute; unknown request classes become other. The allowlists bound cardinality without publishing session IDs, database paths, command suffixes, or caller-provided names. The exporter's shared series cap still applies.

The transcripts request family includes canonical event appends and retention.

Shared-state reads use kind stateRead (formerly state_read) and the same bounded operation-family classifier as SQLite writers. Examples include devicePairing, acpSessions, workers, and cron; standalone admission reads use admit. The read owner supplies the operation before queue admission, so queue wait and execution use the same class without labeling request payloads.

Dispatch is the host scheduler's allocation of a slot, not a worker-side CPU timestamp. Request duration includes preparation, cold worker startup, transport, host exchanges, and I/O. General task pools report task; SQLite commands retain their bounded operation family. These metrics do not separate individual pools for the same worker entrypoint, and unscoped one-shot inspection subprocesses are outside the queue gauge. Identity and avatar pools share compute admission with other compute pools; their queue wait does not by itself prove their own worker limit is too small.

Observations use the existing asynchronous diagnostic queue and begin when a consumer subscribes. Queue drops can lose samples or leave a gauge at its last delivered value until another request updates it. Check openclaw_diagnostic_async_queue_dropped_total before interpreting a saturated interval. No worker limits, scheduling order, or cancellation behavior change.

# Worker wait p99, by kind and bounded request familyhistogram_quantile(0.99,  sum by (le, kind, request_class) (rate(openclaw_worker_queue_wait_seconds_bucket[5m]))) # Request classes occupying dispatch slots for the most wall timesum by (kind, request_class) (rate(openclaw_worker_request_seconds_sum[5m])) # Shared-state read rate, by operation familysum by (request_class) (rate(openclaw_worker_request_seconds_count{kind="stateRead"}[5m]))

Memory and process churn

openclaw_memory_bytes exposes rss, heap_total, heap_used, external, array_buffers, worker_heap_total, and worker_heap_used. RSS covers the whole process. The unprefixed heap and native-buffer values cover the main isolate; array_buffers is included in external, so do not add them together. These values do not account for every native allocation or allocator arena.

Worker totals sum completed native heap samples from live Workers created after the resource registry starts. On Node, this includes direct plugin Workers; nested Workers, native-library thread pools (such as Discord DAVE's Rayon pool), and V8's internal threads are outside the parent registry. The 30-second diagnostics heartbeat starts a nonblocking refresh, retaining at most one outstanding request per Worker. Samples expire after 60 seconds and are removed when the Worker exits. Compare openclaw_worker_heap_sampled_count with openclaw_worker_count: startup, unavailable APIs, and stalled Workers can produce partial totals. No heap snapshot or extra sampling timer is created. openclaw_worker_heap_used_bytes{script="..."} sums fresh heap samples for each Worker script. Labels use a fixed allowlist of runtime-entrypoint, pooled, and bundled plugin Worker basenames, normalized to .js in source and packaged runs; unknown, eval, and unwrapped third-party Workers use other. Full paths and eval source are never recorded. A script's series disappears when it has no live, fresh samples. Memory-pressure logs include the same byte counts and Worker coverage counts, plus workerHeaps: the five largest individual fresh Worker heaps as {script, heapUsed, heapTotal} (bytes), using the same bounded script names.

openclaw_worker_started_total{script="..."} and openclaw_worker_retired_total{script="...",reason="..."} expose cumulative starts and confirmed native exits through the same heartbeat. Retirement reasons are idle_timeout, memory_pressure, closed, rotation, cancelled, failure, or exit when an owner did not specify a reason. A retirement request does not count until the Worker exits; failed termination and retries do not double-count. Counters survive exporter restarts and reset with the process. Use 60 * rate(openclaw_worker_started_total[5m]) for starts per minute by script. These counts share the registry coverage limits above; they do not measure resident memory released by an exit.

openclaw gateway call diagnostics.lanes --json also reports workerCount, workerPoolCount, and workerPools. Each pool entry contains a process-local poolId, an allowlisted script, and its live workerCount. The response lists the 100 largest live pools; workerPoolCount includes all live pools. Counts include pending retirements until native exit and disappear when a pool has no live Workers. Direct Workers contribute to workerCount without a pool entry. These are JavaScript Worker counts, not an operating-system thread census.

openclaw_child_process_spawn_total{family="...",operation="..."} counts successful launches through OpenClaw's shared spawn and exec owners, including brokered launches. Diagnostics must be enabled. The existing heartbeat publishes accumulated counts after at least one minute, with debug logs reporting counts and rates using the actual elapsed interval. Failed launches, direct calls bypassing these owners, and descendants started by children are excluded. Families are a fixed executable-name allowlist; unrecognized commands become other. Git launches carry a bounded owner/operation label: repository.identities, repository.branches, checkout.revision, checkout.context, checkout.diff, checkout.baseline, pull-request.branch-facts, worktree.snapshot, worktree.cleanup, worktree.provision, worktree.inspect, worktree.recovery, workspace.inventory, workspace.manifest, project.clone, workspace.result-cleanup, session.materialize, or publication. Worker operations retain their admitted owner when the parent launches Git, including parallel batches and retries. Unattributed Git launches use unknown; other executable families use none. Arguments, repository paths, session IDs, and free-text caller names are never recorded. For launches per minute grouped by Git owner, use 60 * sum by (operation) (rate(openclaw_child_process_spawn_total{family="git"}[5m])). To retain the previous per-family view, use 60 * sum by (family) (rate(openclaw_child_process_spawn_total[5m])); this window accommodates the minute-batched publication. Neither accounting path changes pressure thresholds or user-tool execution.

workspace.result-cleanup identifies the post-start worker-placement orphan-ref inventory. It examines at most eight checkout roots per full recovery sweep, serially, and yields to active Gateway requests. The existing recovery scheduler continues unfinished work; completed roots remain recorded only for that startup cleanup pass. Normal result settlement still removes its own refs immediately.

Garbage collection duration

openclaw_gc_duration_seconds records elapsed garbage collection (GC) duration reported by Node.js for the hosting JavaScript isolate. Each observation is one GC entry, not CPU time, allocated bytes, or a guaranteed stop-the-world pause. Compare its bucket counts with event-loop window maxima to investigate GC as a possible contributor to stalls; matching scrape intervals do not prove causality.

Collection uses the existing diagnostics enablement and starts when the diagnostics heartbeat observes an interested consumer, such as a metrics exporter. A consumer added after heartbeat startup may wait until the next 30-second tick, or longer if the event loop is stalled. Entries preceding observer activation are not backfilled. Demand is checked when entries are delivered, so a brief consumer gap before the next heartbeat can still yield delayed observations. Losing the last consumer suppresses new exports; the observer disconnects at the next heartbeat. Disabling diagnostics or stopping the heartbeat disconnects it immediately.

The histogram is absent until the first observation, so absence does not prove zero GC. Queue drops, the series cap, observation gaps and process restarts limit coverage. Diagnostics disable/re-enable preserves the exporter's existing counters; restarting the exporter resets them as usual. No extra timer, GC trigger, trace attribution or application payload is collected.

Label policy

PromQL recipes

# Gateway RPC requests per second by methodsum by (method) (rate(openclaw_gateway_rpc_requests_total[5m])) # 95th percentile first-response latency by methodhistogram_quantile(  0.95,  sum by (le, method) (rate(openclaw_gateway_rpc_first_response_seconds_bucket[5m]))) # 95th percentile operator request start-queue wait by methodhistogram_quantile(  0.95,  sum by (le, method) (rate(openclaw_gateway_rpc_queue_wait_seconds_bucket[5m]))) # Tokens per second, split by providersum by (provider) (rate(openclaw_model_tokens_total[1m])) # Spend (USD) over the last hour, by modelsum by (model) (increase(openclaw_model_cost_usd_total[1h])) # 95th percentile model run durationhistogram_quantile(  0.95,  sum by (le, provider, model)    (rate(openclaw_run_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))) # Queue wait time SLO (95p under 2s)histogram_quantile(  0.95,  sum by (le, lane) (rate(openclaw_queue_lane_wait_seconds_bucket[5m]))) < 2 # Skill usage, split by bounded sourcesum by (skill, source) (increase(openclaw_skill_used_total[24h])) # Dropped Prometheus series (cardinality alarm)increase(openclaw_prometheus_series_dropped_total[15m]) > 0 # Completed windows whose maximum delay exceeded one secondincrease(openclaw_gateway_event_loop_delay_max_seconds_count[5m])  - increase(openclaw_gateway_event_loop_delay_max_seconds_bucket{le="1"}[5m]) # Seconds represented by exported event-loop windowsincrease(openclaw_gateway_event_loop_observed_seconds_total[5m]) # Observed GC entries whose elapsed duration exceeded one secondincrease(openclaw_gc_duration_seconds_count[5m])  - increase(openclaw_gc_duration_seconds_bucket{le="1"}[5m])

Run, harness-run, model-call (including synthetic model turns), and message-dispatch duration histograms preserve the existing bounds through 600 seconds and add 900, 1800, and 3600 seconds. Each label set expands into 22 scrape series. Other duration histograms keep their existing bounds.

Percentiles remain bucket-based estimates; observations above one hour still fall only in +Inf. Upgrading cannot recover the distribution of historical overflow samples. During a rolling upgrade, avoid pooling instances with different bucket layouts, and use a query window containing only samples from the new layout when evaluating long-run percentiles.

Choosing between Prometheus and OpenTelemetry export

OpenClaw supports both surfaces independently. You can run either, both, or neither.

Troubleshooting

Related

• Diagnostics export — local diagnostics zip for support bundles
• Health and readiness — /healthz and /readyz checks
• Logging — file-based logging
• OpenTelemetry export — OTLP push for traces, metrics, and logs